Race Relations

With the ideology of equality and natural rights permeating American culture after the Revolutionary War, the system of slavery that had been quietly introduced in the American colonies in colonial …
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No doubt about it, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, a small, but dedicated group of African-American activists, including George Downing of Newport and Ichabod Northup, Ransom …
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When young Matilda Sissieretta Joyner stepped onto the stage at Providence’s Pond Street Baptist Church in the early 1880s and began to sing, no one in the church hall could …
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Newport Gardner was born Occramer Marycoo, perhaps in Ghana, in 1746. When he was fourteen, he was captured and taken as a slave to Newport, Rhode Island, where he was …
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World War I was a transformative moment for America. It would propel our still young nation into a world-wide conflict and require an unparalleled national mobilization of troops and supplies. …
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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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[Note from the Editor: The following piece, celebrating Pettaquamscutt Rock in South Kingstown, was penned in 1958 by William D. Metz, who starting in 1945 and until his retirement in …
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In Rhode Island, slavery was placed on the road to extinction on March 1, 1784, when the General Assembly passed a gradual manumission act making any black born to …
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I have no idea exactly when during the mid-eighteenth century that Newport Philips entered this world but I do know the ”where” and the ‘what” of his beginnings. What he …
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Rhode Island has many claims to fame.  It is unusual, however, to discover a new one.  With “12 Years a Slave” winning the 2013 Academy Award for best picture, its …
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