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Race Relations

African American Property Ownership in Newport from the 1780s to 1820s
1 week ago

African American Property Ownership in Newport from the 1780s to 1820s

Home ownership is a mainstay of the American Dream. In colonial Rhode Island, merchant shippers and merchant retailers, as well as professionals, such as attorneys and physicians, had access and …
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Book Review: Linford D. Fisher, Sheila M. McIntyre, and Julia A. Fisher, Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America, A Documentary History
2 weeks ago

Book Review: Linford D. Fisher, Sheila M. McIntyre, and Julia A. Fisher, Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America, A Documentary History

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., Thomas Commuck, and Indigenous Land Claims from the Brothertown Narragansetts
1 month ago

Elisha Potter Jr., Thomas Commuck, and Indigenous Land Claims from the Brothertown Narragansetts

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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“Boasted Land of Freedom”: Rhode Island Black Leaders and the Early Black Convention Movement, 1830-1835
2 months ago

“Boasted Land of Freedom”: Rhode Island Black Leaders and the Early Black Convention Movement, 1830-1835

We rejoice that we are thrown into a revolution where the contest is not for landed territory, but for freedom; the weapons not carnal, but spiritual; where struggles are not …
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Book Review: CJ Martin, The Precious Birthright: Black Leaders and the Fight to Vote in Antebellum Rhode Island (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024)
4 months ago

Book Review: CJ Martin, The Precious Birthright: Black Leaders and the Fight to Vote in Antebellum Rhode Island (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024)

The Providence author Catharine Read Williams often liked to refer to the tumultuous political and constitutional storm that swept Rhode Island in 1841-42 as a “tempest in a teapot.” …
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Book Review: Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
5 months ago

Book Review: Seth Rockman, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

Historian Seth Rockman’s deeply researched and thoroughly engaging new book, Plantation Goods, deserves to be on the shelf of all those interested in late 18th and 19th century America. Many …
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Indian Forts in Early Rhode Island
12 months ago

Indian Forts in Early Rhode Island

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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Governor’s 1708 Report Tells Where the First Black Enslaved People Who Arrived in Rhode Island Came from and About the Arrival of the First Slave Ship from Africa
1 year ago

Governor’s 1708 Report Tells Where the First Black Enslaved People Who Arrived in Rhode Island Came from and About the Arrival of the First Slave Ship from Africa

[The following is perhaps the earliest official report on slavery in Rhode Island and the colony’s ties to the African slave trade. Historians and students of history of Rhode Island …
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A Book Review: Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence by Shirley L. Green (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2023)
1 year ago

A Book Review: Revolutionary Blacks: Discovering the Frank Brothers, Freeborn Men of Color, Soldiers of Independence by Shirley L. Green (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2023)

This captivating book tells a new American story. It is the first book to detail the life, challenges, fears and hopes of a Black soldier in the Continental Army during …
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Gaspee Raid Inspires Boston Tea Party Raiders to Disguise Themselves as Narragansetts
1 year ago

Gaspee Raid Inspires Boston Tea Party Raiders to Disguise Themselves as Narragansetts

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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