Native Peoples

The Indigenous people who first interacted with the Pilgrims in 1620 identified as Pokanoket, not Wampanoag. The widespread use of “Wampanoag” to describe this group is a colonial-era distortion that …
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This article reviews the last names of Narragansett Indian families from 1777 to 1936, almost 160 years, using four separate lists.

From the Revolutionary War Period, 1775-1783:

In March and …
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This is a most welcome book. Books on Roger Williams can be hard for the average reader to read. In part, this is because sixteenth century English language is so …
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Elisha Potter, Jr. was the son of prominent attorney and Rhode Island politician Elisha Potter, Sr. and his wife Mary (Mawney) Potter. As a young man, Elisha Jr. grew up …
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In Rhode Island history, little is said (or known) about the Native American defenses against the colonial settlers in southern New England. Human beings had learned, early on in their …
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Last week, this website ran an article providing strong contemporaneous evidence that many of the men who broke open the tea chests and destroyed the tea inside them on board …
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In the evening of December 16, 1773, a band of Boston Whigs (commonly known today as Patriots) charged onto three merchant ships at a wharf in Boston Harbor and dumped …
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“We sometimes speak of stubborn facts. Nonsense! A fact is a mere babe when compared with a stubborn theory.” – Samuel McChord Crothers

On October 7, 2017, the Hopkinton Land …
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In his first major foot race, the Boston Marathon in 1935, at the age of twenty, Ellison “Tarzan” Brown came out of nowhere. He was a poor Narragansett Indian from …
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The earliest written descriptions of Indians in North America were by Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian mariner commissioned by the King of France in 1523 to discover whether Asia could …
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