About Erik Chaput & Russell J. DeSimone

Historian Seth Rockman’s deeply researched and thoroughly engaging new book, Plantation Goods, deserves to be on the shelf of all those interested in late 18th and 19th century America. Many …
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Note: This article is the second in a two-part series on the career of civil rights reformer George Downing. Readers can access Part I at https://smallstatebighistory.com/george-t-downing-and-the-black-convention-movement/

My self-respect revolts at …
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Fear not; no antagonism of interest would be the result of admitting in common to your workshops the colored mechanic, of admitting his child as an apprentice.

(Appeal to …
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[Note from the authors: The essay that follows is a condensed version of a longer essay that is to accompany a major addition to the Dorr Rebellion Project (at http://library.providence.edu/dorr/) …
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[The authors dedicate this article to their friend and mentor Patrick T. Conley, the dean of Rhode Island historians.]

From 2010 to 2015, the publishing world was …
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No doubt about it, in the decades leading up to the Civil War, a small, but dedicated group of African-American activists, including George Downing of Newport and Ichabod Northup, Ransom …
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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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More than any other Rhode Islander of his generation, Sidney S. Rider was in the business of history. Rider was the premier bookseller in Rhode Island in the later part …
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There is perhaps no better known expression from the American Revolutionary period than “no taxation without representation.” In July 1768, Silas Downer, a member of the Providence Sons of Liberty, …
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