Race Relations

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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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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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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[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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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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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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I am sure that the word sharecropping brings to most folk’s minds, images of the antebellum deep South, poor Black men and women toiling away for little reward, and merciless …
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Note: This article is the second in a two-part series on the career of civil rights reformer George Downing. Readers can access Part I at https://smallstatebighistory.com/george-t-downing-and-the-black-convention-movement/

My self-respect revolts at …
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Fear not; no antagonism of interest would be the result of admitting in common to your workshops the colored mechanic, of admitting his child as an apprentice.

(Appeal to …
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