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Pettaquamscutt Rock Commemorated, May 11, 1958
9 years ago

Pettaquamscutt Rock Commemorated, May 11, 1958

[Note from the Editor: The following piece, celebrating Pettaquamscutt Rock in South Kingstown, was penned in 1958 by William D. Metz, who starting in 1945 and until his retirement in …
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Dirty Work, Clean Money: The Life of Whaling Ship Captain John Deblois and his Wife Henrietta
9 years ago

Dirty Work, Clean Money: The Life of Whaling Ship Captain John Deblois and his Wife Henrietta

Whaling “is a wretched life [of] privations and hardship deprived of friends and society,” John Scott Deblois (1816-1885) wrote in an 1844 letter to his family in Newport. [1] Voyages …
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George T. Downing: Rhode Island’s Most Prominent African American Leader
9 years ago

George T. Downing: Rhode Island’s Most Prominent African American Leader

In Rhode Island, slavery was placed on the road to extinction on March 1, 1784, when the General Assembly passed a gradual manumission act making any black born to …
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Collecting Rhode Island’s Remarkable Election Ballots
9 years ago

Collecting Rhode Island’s Remarkable Election Ballots

Providence was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, and in 1643 Williams obtained a patent from the British crown giving powers of self-government to the towns of Providence, Portsmouth, and …
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David Sherman Baker and the Stolen Election of 1893
9 years ago

David Sherman Baker and the Stolen Election of 1893

By  •  Politics

Life, as anyone who has lived for a time can tell you, is fraught with irony. And sometimes, so it would appear, is death. A case in point is that …
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John M. Hay at Brown University
9 years ago

John M. Hay at Brown University

By  •  Biography

John M. Hay is perhaps Brown University’s most illustrious undergraduate. He started his career as assistant secretary to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. His photographs alongside Lincoln have …
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Two Rhode Islanders Make It Big in Texas: Albert Martin at the Alamo and Shanghai Pierce the Cattle Baron
9 years ago

Two Rhode Islanders Make It Big in Texas: Albert Martin at the Alamo and Shanghai Pierce the Cattle Baron

It is odd but true that the little state of Rhode Island produced two heroes in the giant state of Texas during Texas’s formative years. One hero was Albert Martin …
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The Hurricane of 1938: An Oral History Told by Nancy Allen Holst,  Forest Fire Warden and Pilot Part II: The Great Timber Blowdown
9 years ago

The Hurricane of 1938: An Oral History Told by Nancy Allen Holst, Forest Fire Warden and Pilot Part II: The Great Timber Blowdown

[Note from the Editor: The following interview appeared in “In the Wake of ’38, Oral history interviews with Rhode Island survivors and witnesses of the devastating hurricane of September 21, …
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The Hurricane of 1938: An Oral History Told by Nancy Allen Holst,  Forest Fire Warden and Pilot Part I: The Devastating Damage She Witnessed
9 years ago

The Hurricane of 1938: An Oral History Told by Nancy Allen Holst, Forest Fire Warden and Pilot Part I: The Devastating Damage She Witnessed

[Note from the Editor: The following interview appeared in “In the Wake of ’38, Oral history interviews with Rhode Island survivors and witnesses of the devastating hurricane of September 21, …
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“Died in the Service of his Country:” A New Look at Rhode Island Civil War Death Records
9 years ago

“Died in the Service of his Country:” A New Look at Rhode Island Civil War Death Records

Civil War historians have long been citing that 620,000 American soldiers, North and South, died in the Civil War. In 2012, however, Dr. David Hacker of Binghamton University, using the …
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