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In the final days of the Civil War, the U.S. Congress established an agency within the War Department that was to have far reaching powers in terms of setting social …
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Many Rhode Islanders are familiar with the sinking of the German submarine U-853 off Block Island in May of 1945 in the waning days of World War II. But U-boats …
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The early court system of Providence was established in its first code of law in 1640, with a body of “five desposers” to ”meete upon gennerall ocations” and look after …
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One of the founding breeds of the Standardbred, the Narragansett Pacer has been extinct since the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Yet the Pacer was ubiquitous in colonial North …
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The earliest written descriptions of Indians in North America were by Giovanni da Verrazzano, an Italian mariner commissioned by the King of France in 1523 to discover whether Asia could …
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I wonder if the strollers and shoppers at Garden City Center are aware that beneath those trendy shops and eateries there was once an active coal mine. Granted, the coal …
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[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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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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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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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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