Race Relations

Rhode Island’s First Light Infantry (called the FLI for short) was disintegrating fast. It was 1927, more than a century after its 1818 founding, and it was able to count …
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Newspaper obituaries for African American residents who died in Newport, Rhode Island, in the decades after the American Revolution are sparse in number. When they were in the Newport Mercury, …
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I came across the copies of documents set forth below by accident. They tell a short, but tragic, tale of an enslaved teenager/young man named Fantee.

I was aware of …
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A recent publication in Williamsburg, Virginia, about a colonial school for enslaved and free children of color spurred this research. Williamsburg historians used their database of student names, as well …
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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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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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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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[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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