Rhode Island – General

The amazing story of Benoni Simmons’s military service in the American Revolution spans some fourteen years, perhaps the longest term of service by anyone in that conflict. More so, his …
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Charles Henry Gosselin had not yet turned two years old when the probate court of Providence committed him to the county orphanage in 1924. He spent his infancy there …
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[Note from the editor:  Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826) prepared surveys of each of the states of the new United States in the 1780s. He prepared one for Rhode Island in 1789; …
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[Note from the editor: The Know-Nothing Party, which became formally known as the American Party, made a splash in Rhode Island briefly from 1854 to 1856. Supporters of the Know …
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In early 1778, from the headquarters of the Continental Army in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, General George Washington’s aide-de-camp, John Laurens, wrote several letters to his father Henry who had recently …
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Old Home Days was a mid-nineteenth century New England tradition in which former sons and daughters of a town returned to the town of their birth for a reunion. The …
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[From the editor:  According to its website, “The Carnegie Hero Fund awards the Carnegie Medal to individuals in the United States and Canada who risk death or serious physical injury …
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On May 13, 1911, in a moving obituary for the famed abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editors of the Providence Journal emphasized the “beloved” reformer’s steadfast commitment to improving the …
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Eliza Jumel (nee, Elizabeth Bowen) was born in Providence on April 2, 1775, the daughter of Phebe Kelly and John Bowen, a sailor. After her parents separated, Phebe lived in …
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“The moment I heard of America, I lov’d her.” The Marquis de Lafayette wrote this in a letter from his camp near Warren, Rhode Island, on September 23, 1778. It …
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