Rhode Island historical timeline

Origins

The Narragansett people held this land when Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts for arguing that civil authority had no jurisdiction over conscience, bought land from them in 1636 and founded Providence as a refuge.

Turning points

The colony guaranteed religious liberty from the start, and its Touro Synagogue of 1763 is the oldest surviving synagogue building in the country. Rhode Island renounced allegiance to the Crown on 4 May 1776, two months before the Declaration — and then refused to ratify the federal Constitution until 1790, the last of the thirteen to do so.

Influential people

Samuel Slater built the first successful water-powered cotton mill in the country at Pawtucket in 1793, which is why the American Industrial Revolution is usually dated from here.

Cultural evolution

The same prosperity that filled the mills built Newport: from the 1850s the wealthiest families in America put up summer houses there of a scale the country had not seen. The state also profited heavily from the slave trade, and Brown University's public accounting of that history in 2006 was among the first by a major institution.

Present-day significance

Voters removed "and Providence Plantations" from the state's formal name in 2020, ending a long argument about a word the plantations sense of which was never the agricultural one.