The story of the indigenous people in what would become Rhode Island, their encounters with Europeans, and their return to sovereignty in the twentieth century. Before Roger Williams set foot in the New World, the Narragansett farmed corn and squash, hunted beaver and deer, and harvested clams and oysters throughout what would become Rhode Island. They also obtained wealth in the form of wampum, a carved shell that was used as currency along the eastern coast. As tensions with the English rose, the Narragansett leaders fought to maintain autonomy. While the elder Sachem Canonicus lived long enough to welcome both Verrazzano and Williams, his nephew Miatonomo was executed for his attempts to preserve their way of life and circumvent English control. Historian Robert A. Geake explores the captivating story of these Native Rhode Islanders.

One of the most popular misconceptions about American Indians is that they are all the same-one homogenous group of people who look alike, speak the same language, and share the same customs and history. Nothing could be further from the truth! This book gives kids an A-Z look at the Native Americans that shaped their state's history. From tribe to tribe, there are large differences in clothing, housing, life-styles, and cultural practices. Help kids explore Native American history by starting with the Native Americans that might have been in their very own backyard! Some of the activities include crossword puzzles, fill in the blanks, and decipher the code.

The tragic and fascinating history of the first epic struggle between white settlers and Native Americans in the early seventeenth century: “a riveting historical validation of emancipatory impulses frustrated in their own time” (Booklist, starred review) as determined Narragansett Indians refused to back down and accept English authority. A devout Puritan minister in seventeenth-century New England, Roger Williams was also a social critic, diplomat, theologian, and politician who fervently believed in tolerance. Yet his orthodox brethren were convinced tolerance fostered anarchy and courted God’s wrath. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace. As the seventeenth century wore on, a steadily deepening antagonism developed between an expansionist, aggressive Puritan culture and an increasingly vulnerable, politically divided Indian population. Indian tribes that had been at the center of the New England communities found themselves shunted off to the margins of the region. By the 1660s, all the major Indian peoples in southern New England had come to accept English authority, either tacitly or explicitly. All, except one: the Narragansetts. In God, War, and Providence “James A. Warren transforms what could have been merely a Pilgrim version of cowboys and Indians into a sharp study of cultural contrast…a well-researched cameo of early America” (The Wall Street Journal). He explores the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams’s Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment. Deeply researched, “Warren’s well-written monograph contains a great deal of insight into the tactics of war on the frontier” (Library Journal) and serves as a telling precedent for white-Native American encounters along the North American frontier for the next 250 years.

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the twentieth century. Native Providence tells the stories of the city's Native residents at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished. Denied their rightful place in modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that became their urban homelands--new places of meaningful attachments. Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from historical and anthropological research in archives, government offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from community memories, geography, and landscape. Patricia E. Rubertone chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left, and returned, or lived in Providence briefly, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, and who made their presence known in this city and in the wider Indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. Their everyday experiences reenvision Providence's past and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.

Tells the story of one state in particular whose role in the slave trade was outsized: Rhode Island Historians have written expansively about the slave economy and its vital role in early American economic life. Like their northern neighbors, Rhode Islanders bought and sold slaves and supplies that sustained plantations throughout the Americas; however, nowhere else was this business so important. During the colonial period trade with West Indian planters provided Rhode Islanders with molasses, the key ingredient for their number one export: rum. More than 60 percent of all the slave ships that left North America left from Rhode Island. During the antebellum period Rhode Islanders were the leading producers of “negro cloth,” a coarse wool-cotton material made especially for enslaved blacks in the American South. Clark-Pujara draws on the documents of the state, the business, organizational, and personal records of their enslavers, and the few first-hand accounts left by enslaved and free black Rhode Islanders to reconstruct their lived experiences. The business of slavery encouraged slaveholding, slowed emancipation and led to circumscribed black freedom. Enslaved and free black people pushed back against their bondage and the restrictions placed on their freedom. It is convenient, especially for northerners, to think of slavery as southern institution. The erasure or marginalization of the northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction—that North has no history of racism to overcome. But we cannot afford such a delusion if we are to truly reconcile with our past.