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Filmmaker Ken Burns has never been shy about tackling big topics, especially the conflicts that have defined us as a nation. In 1990, Burns’s epic documentary on the Civil War …
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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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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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[Note from the editor:  Last year I visited City Hall in Providence to do some research at the City Archives.  While walking through the building, I noticed a number of …
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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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This article reviews the last names of Narragansett Indian families from 1777 to 1936, almost 160 years, using four separate lists.

From the Revolutionary War Period, 1775-1783:

In March and …
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If you have not heard of Thomas Dorr and appreciate Rhode Island history, you should buy this book.  Even if you know all about him, you should purchase the …
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Starting by the mid-nineteenth century, people began to recognize the ill effects that unsanitary, unhealthy, and crowded conditions prevailing in the manufacturing centers and cities had upon their mental and …
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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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In the mid eighteenth century in Newport, there were three men from the same family, contemporaries with almost the same name, all sons of governors.

Two, father and son, were …
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