Heritage Harbor Foundation
c/o Dr. Patrick T. Conley, President
1445 Wampanoag Trail, Suite #201
East Providence, RI 02915
(401) 433-0044
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The Six Big Ideas

Although mostly eschewed by modern historians as too simple an explanation for explaining the causes of history’s course, ‘geographical determinism’ was held to have played a strong underlying cause for a good deal of the Ocean State’s story. As a key point between the metropolitan centers of Boston and New York, local historians agreed that much of Rhode Island’s history was driven by being an inter­section and transfer point between these two giant engines of enterprise. Due to a fluke of geography (the east-ward bending arm of Cape Cod), the most direct water route from New York to Boston was up Long Island Sound to Narra­gansett Bay and twenty eight miles further to Providence. From there it was overland. Before the advent of the Cape Cod shipping canal in 1914, the water route up Narra­gansett Bay was one hundred miles shorter than shipping around Cape Cod. Avoiding Atlantic storms around the outer cape was safer, too.

This arrangement making Providence a shipping stepping stone between Boston and New York had many implications. The Providence port facilities expanded. Seven shipping lines had their base along the crescent bookended by Fox and India Points. Rhode Island was one of three postal routes started by Benjamin Franklin. Route 1, beginning in Maine, runs through Rhode Island and ends at Key West, Florida. To a lesser degree of importance, Rte 6 begins at Provincetown and goes all the way to California. The only intersection of these north/south/east/west roads in all America is in downtown Providence. The entire pageant of transportation is on view in the pages of Rhode Island history: from Indian trails, to post roads, water transit of all kinds from the time of Roger Williams’ canoe to the off-loading of imported cars at Quonset and Providence. The stage coach, railroads, truck and air links were important not only to Rhode Islanders, but the whole region. The Blackstone Canal provided Worcester with a port. Purportedly, at the turn of the 20th century some 300 trains a day chugged in and out of Providence’s Union Station.

Hence, the historians of the History Round Table concluded that the story of Rhode Island could not be told without several chapters devoted to Transportation and the role Narragansett Bay played in shaping Rhode Island life: first as a watery highway connecting some seventeen of its thirty-nine cities and towns, as a job creator for fishermen, ferry boat operators, light-house tenders, a host for the U.S. military, and as a play land and recreation center with shore dinner halls and gorgeous beaches. The Bay was important to the state for nearly its entire history, even if it meant in the mid-century to turn down attractive offers to set up large oil refineries, replacing jobs lost in manufacturing.

As noted above, a history of the state cannot help but tell the impact of two centuries of immigrants, first from the British Isles, from French Canada, from southern Italy, other near European countries like Scandinavia, Portugal and the Azores, but also from Russia, Poland, the Ukraine, and from the eastern Mediterranean, Syria, Lebanon, Greece. The state’s relationship to Africa spans nearly five centuries. So, Rhode Island as a cultural crossroads is a third primary theme. The fourth Big Idea is related to the third because it drew most of the immigrants here to chase a living. Rhode Island was a major producer of textiles, from the time of Slater in the 1790s to well into the 20th century before the mills went south. Low skill and low wage jobs were a major immigrant magnet. More skillful aptitudes were required to work at the factories producing steam engines, the machine tools of Brown and Sharpe, the adroit sculpting of Gorham silver, as well as the costume jewelry industry. The state’s penchant for invention and design in all of these enterprises continues to be part of the newer economic engines, though medicine and university education (Meds and Eds) has replaced much of the manufacturing in the very same neighborhoods which once employed thousands who held on to many of their old world ways.

For their fifth big idea, the historians fell back on a tried and true device for organizing the ‘facts’ of history: notable turning points. When did the course of RI’s story change? Was it when agRIculture shifted to maRItime and then on to industRIal? And now we have touRIsm. Turning points help us see change and in turn make us study changes origins and impacts. Turning points, usually political elections provide a handy way to organize and erect milestones so as to have perspective. Such phenomena as studying the ever widening role of women in the Rhode Island story benefit by the application of the use of turning points.

The final big idea required to complete the story of Rhode Island is acknowledging the importance of Rhode Islanders’ sense of place. Although outside observers often mistakenly call Rhode Island “America’s City-State,” Rhode Islanders typically don’t view the entire geography of the state as the locale of their life experience. Rhode Islanders live in urban neighborhoods with distinctive personalities. They live in former factory villages. Many of these, and there are more than a hundred, once had their own volunteer fire department, marching band, baseball team, post office, library, and were the parish of a Roman Catholic church. Efficiency experts attempting regional organization of community services run afoul of the old allegiances to names of places which rarely even appeared on a map. There is a prevailing notion of the ‘way we always did things’ that goes back to village life in the former countries of origins. Thus, ‘the custom of neighbors,’ or the ‘custom of the neighborhood’ is a phenomenon that is ignored at some peril. Without understanding this additional legacy of city and town, or leaving it out in a study of Rhode Island, dooms any attempt to record a comprehensive analysis of the Rhode Island people.

The decade-long seminar on the dimensions of the field of Rhode Island history was picked up from the history round table by the cluster of curators hired by Heritage Harbor to populate the museum’s proposed exhibits. Working with extremely well qualified designers and influenced broadly by the newest trends in immersion exhibitry the Six Big Ideas became the center themes of the proposed new state history museum at the former Narragansett Electric power station. So as to present an ever-fresh look within the scope of the Big Ideas, more than 200 sub-themes stemming from the Six were sketched out. The overall impact and story would remain, but the way it would be presented would change by providing ever new examples of artifacts and story-lines. Visitors would be encouraged to return and return again.

Now, since it is no longer possible to present these ideas at the power station, the sale of Heritage Harbor’s interest in that location has provided a fund from which grants will be made annually to other history organizations willing to deliver these themes at their own sites around the state.

By organizing our grant-making program upon these six major themes, by using the proceeds of our endowment to tease out projects illustrating the Big Ideas, and by ultimately engineering the results into a comprehensive history of Rhode Island, Heritage Harbor Foundation makes good on its promise to its donors to construct a new platform of historical perspective suitable for supplying wisdom to the discourse and debate over today’s policies and programs public policy.

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