About Christian McBurney

This is a short history of modern pandemics, starting with the Great Influenza of 1918, and ending with the modern coronaviruses, SARs, MERs and COVID-19. Most of the last part …
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In his first major foot race, the Boston Marathon in 1935, at the age of twenty, Ellison “Tarzan” Brown came out of nowhere. He was a poor Narragansett Indian from …
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My book, Kidnapping the Enemy: The Special Operations to Capture Generals Charles Lee & Richard Prescott (Westholme, 2017), focused on the stunning captures of two major generals who fought on …
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I am crazy about pontoons. Perhaps you could tell that from the chapter on pontoons in my recent book (with co-authors Norm Desmarais and Varoujan Karentz), Untold Stories from World …
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[Author’s note:  By the 1820s, circuses were becoming a popular form of mass entertainment. Traveling from small town to small town, they attracted increasingly large crowds.  The first elephants from …
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Recently, there has been a spate of Rhode Island history books published by smallstatebighistory.com authors. These are in addition to Untold Stories of World War II Rhode Island (History Press, …
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In last week’s article, I listed e my top ten most interesting and amusing street names in Rhode Island. This article includes a list of [14] honorable mention most interesting …
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Here are my top ten most interesting and amusing street names in Rhode Island. The names of the persons who provided me with the idea for the name and related …
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As I poked around the photography division of the Navy History and Heritage Command last summer at Washington Yard in Washington, D.C., I was hoping to find more photographs for …
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In early October 1927, baseball sluggers Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig arrived at Providence to play an exhibition baseball game.  It was a memorable day for kids and adults alike.

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