Month: November 2023

Frank L. Grzyb and Russell J. DeSimone The story of Gertrude I. Johnson and Mary T. Wales and the founding of Johnson & Wales University is truly an American success story. Given the times in which they lived and the difficulty women faced in any professional endeavor in the early twentieth century, their story is

12.19.09 “Making the right of citizenship identical with color, brings a stain upon the State, unmans the heart of an already injured people, and corrupts the purity of Republican Faith.” (1841 Petition from the “Colored Citizens of Rhode Island to the Rhode Island Constitutional Convention”) Early in the morning of May 18, 1842, Thomas Wilson

by Lincoln Steffens The most infamous article ever written about Rhode Island is almost certainly the article by the legendary muckraker Lincoln Steffens, which ran in the February 1905 edition of McClure’s Magazine. Steffens found the Ocean State rotten with corruption from Providence and Pawtucket to Bristol and Block Island, with individual citizens selling their

By Dr. Patrick T. Conley In 1972, Providence College archivist and historian Matthew J. Smith conducted a dozen lengthy interviews in Providence with former governor Robert Emmett Quinn just after he had stepped down as the first chief judge of the U.S. Court of Military Appeals. Eight years later, the politically knowledgeable Smith became Speaker