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Rhode Island’s First Light Infantry (called the FLI for short) was disintegrating fast. It was 1927, more than a century after its 1818 founding, and it was able to count …
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Today, when only two rail lines exist across Rhode Island, the main Amtrak line and the Providence and Worcester tracks, and stations on these routes are very limited, it may …
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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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Christopher Greene was one of Rhode Island’s greatest heroes of the Revolutionary War, but his life was tragically cut short.  He was appointed a lieutenant in the Kentish Guards, an …
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Stephen Hopkins (1707–85), statesman, pamphleteer, and signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born on March 7, 1707, in Providence easterly of a former Indian village called Mashapaug. This site …
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“Long did I endeavor with unfeigned and unwearied Zeal, to preserve from breaking, that fine and noble China Vase the British Empire: for I knew that being once broken, the …
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The Indigenous people who first interacted with the Pilgrims in 1620 identified as Pokanoket, not Wampanoag. The widespread use of “Wampanoag” to describe this group is a colonial-era distortion that …
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Newspaper obituaries for African American residents who died in Newport, Rhode Island, in the decades after the American Revolution are sparse in number. When they were in the Newport Mercury, …
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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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