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Race Relations

African Americans in Rhode Island Who Used Food to Achieve Independence
7 years ago

African Americans in Rhode Island Who Used Food to Achieve Independence

Among the gifts that immigrants have brought to the United States are their native cuisines. Indeed, opening a restaurant or food-related business was—and still is—a traditional recipe for financial …
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Separate and Sometimes Equal: African Burials in Colonial Newport
7 years ago

Separate and Sometimes Equal: African Burials in Colonial Newport

In colonial times, death was a common occurrence reaching into all families, regardless of wealth, social station and race. In seaport towns such as Newport, Rhode Island, influenza, scarlet …
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Three Recent Historical Novels with Revolutionary (and Slave-Holding) Rhode Island as the Backdrop
7 years ago

Three Recent Historical Novels with Revolutionary (and Slave-Holding) Rhode Island as the Backdrop

This is the third article in a row providing book reviews of recent Rhode Island history books. Surprisingly, each of the three books here is a historical novel that …
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Caleb Eddy and an African Slave Voyage Gone Awry
8 years ago

Caleb Eddy and an African Slave Voyage Gone Awry

After the French Revolution, while tensions between Great Britain and the new French revolutionary government were growing, the disruption with trade to the West Indies was acute, especially for Rhode …
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The South Kingstown Town Council Refuses to Free Patience, an Enslaved Woman
9 years ago

The South Kingstown Town Council Refuses to Free Patience, an Enslaved Woman

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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The End of School Segregation in Rhode Island
9 years ago

The End of School Segregation in Rhode Island

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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Sissieretta Jones, Providence’s Famous Soprano
9 years ago

Sissieretta Jones, Providence’s Famous Soprano

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: From Slave to Musical Composer
9 years ago

Newport Gardner: From Slave to Musical Composer

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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Rhode Island Women of Color During the Great War
9 years ago

Rhode Island Women of Color During the Great War

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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Verrazzano Visits the Narragansett Indians in 1524
9 years ago

Verrazzano Visits the Narragansett Indians in 1524

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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