Latest Posts

This is the story of the Reverend James Manning, Brown’s first president, his wife Margaret, and Lewis Manning, his slave. The manumission of Lewis Manning in 1784 is important for …
Read More

In the afternoon of June 9, 1772, the sloop Hannah, a Providence packet commanded by Capt. Benjamin Lindsey, sailed forth from Newport up Narragansett Bay toward its home port. Very …
Read More

In 2003, a dramatic movie about a Depression-era race horse and his oversized jockey became a top box office film hit.  This story of hope and perseverance was woven into …
Read More

The opening page of Rhode Island blacksmith “Nailer Tom” Hazard’s diary includes an entry for June 21, 1778, during the American Revolutionary War. At the time, the British occupied Newport. Hazard records …
Read More

Esek Hopkins, the commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War, hailed from Rhode Island. He has two significant honorifics in Rhode Island. First, there is a statue …
Read More

Rhode Island has frequently had third parties appear in its statewide elections. Almost always these parties had a single purpose, whether Anti-Masonic, Liberty (opposed to the expansion of slavery), American/Know-Nothing …
Read More

Last spring, Patrick Donovan, the talented and hardworking curator at the Varnum Memorial Armory Museum in East Greenwich, announced his discovery of  a handwritten letter from a formerly enslaved man …
Read More

Rhode Island’s first lighthouse was constructed in 1749 on Beavertail Point, the southern tip of Conanicut Island (better known as Jamestown). Initially named Newport Light, Beavertail followed Massachusetts’s 1716 Boston …
Read More

[This article originally ran in the Journal of the American Revolution, at www.allthingsliberty.com]

In July 1780, after three and half months at sea, nearly 6,000 thousand men[1] and supplies crammed …
Read More

This essay, on the character of Bishop Harkins and his career as an administrator, and on the bishop’s social apostolate, were written in 1978 for the projected second volume of …
Read More