History
In “Strange Bedfellows“, sometime ProJo book reviewer Erik Chaput and Russell J. DeSimone explain how free blacks in antebellum Rhode Island joined forces with the conservative Law and Order party to help put down the egalitarian and populist Dorr Rebellion. [I]n Rhode Island, forces loyal to Governor King, including some 200 black men from Providence,…
It shouldn’t go unremarked that radical left historian Howard Zinn has passed away at the age of 87. Zinn, Matt Damon’s favorite historian, is best known for his A Peoples History of the United States, a controversial work that has generated mountains of debate within (and outside of) the historical profession. (He even caused a…
Peter Berkowitz reviews Patrick Allitt’s The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History in the latest Policy Review. Berkowitz explains that Allitt helps explain the “paradoxes that constitute conservatism in America.” The questions that guide his study are straightforward: “Where did conservatism come from, what are its intellectual sources, and why is it internally divided?”…
I suppose when you’ve established a weekly shtick, you gotta keep doing it. Even when the source material is a Revolutionary War hero. So sometimes you overreach. Like comparing Rhode Island’s own Revolutionary War hero General Nathanael Greene to Lt. William Calley, the war criminal notorious for his role in the My Lai massacre. It…
Brian Wilder conveys an interesting and timely history lesson on slavery in Rhode Island, but he ends with a peculiar conclusion: Today it is strange, and perhaps convenient, how little most of us know about the extent of Rhode Island’s involvement in slavery. The least we can do is to dump a word that lost…
The beastliness of tarring and feathering has probably been the most deeply disturbing smack of history as I’ve worked my way through HBO’s John Adams presentation on DVD. During a childhood vacation, I walked through a wax museum with my parents, and although much of the attraction is lost to my memory, I still remember…
Still talking about ‘Plantations’: Supporters of a plan that would give voters in next year’s general election the opportunity to strike the phrase “and Providence Plantations” from the state’s formal name, launched a public awareness and education campaign Wednesday….Backers say there is much work to be done if they are to persuade Rhode Island voters…
Ocean State Republican has posted video and text of President Reagan’s 1984 D-Day speech: The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge…
They editorialized, they polled and now they’ve been seconded by the faculty: Brown University will no longer celebrate Columbus Day. Why? From an earlier editorial at the Brown Daily Herald: Anyone who has studied history, especially at a mostly liberal institution like Brown, knows that Christopher Columbus did not “discover” the Americas. Not only are…
