The most extraordinary collection of photos of any small town in the entire United States. Block Island, in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of New England, has a photographic history of 145 years. No other community could produce such an array of images from both land and sea. Volume 2 of The Block Island History of Photography adds more than 400 images to America’s history, from shipwrecks and lighthouses, steamboats and tourists, World Wars 1 & 2, Prohibition era fun, into hard times, through two strong hurricanes, and yet more fun. The earlier Volume 1, from 1870 to the 1910s, contains another 380 images. This is the face of quiet America most people missed — and most, once lived, would miss.

Block Island, in the Atlantic Ocean off the southern coast of New England, is further from other land -- from the mainland or other islands -- than any other town along the 1,800 mile eastern coast of the United States. Isolated from neighbors, with no harbor until the late 19th century, Block Island evolved differently. Each chapter of Block Island, The Sea stands alone, providing one or more stories, and the scholarly research to go with it, about this little town -- currently with 850 year-round inhabitants whose singular preference is to be completely surrounded by salt water. Subjects include fishing, piracy, lighthouses, hurricane. shipwrecks and more. Fully indexed, and with over 200 images.

Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from Rotterdam to Philadelphia grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast. The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and its neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers and crew on board-sick, frozen, and starving-were all that remained of the 340 men, women, and children who had left their homeland the previous spring. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak. Shortly after the wreck, rumors began to circulate that the passengers had been mistreated by the ship's crew and by some of the islanders. The stories persisted, transforming over time as stories do and, in less than a hundred years, two terrifying versions of the event had emerged. In one account, the crew murdered the captain, extorted money from the passengers by prolonging the voyage and withholding food, then abandoned ship. In the other, the islanders lured the ship ashore with a false signal light, then murdered and robbed all on board. Some claimed the ship was set ablaze to hide evidence of these crimes, their stories fueled by reports of a fiery ghost ship first seen drifting in Block Island Sound on the one-year anniversary of the wreck. These tales became known as the legend of the Palatine, the name given to the ship in later years, when its original name had been long forgotten. The flaming apparition was nicknamed the Palatine Light. The eerie phenomenon has been witnessed by hundreds of people over the centuries, and numerous scientific theories have been offered as to its origin. Its continued reappearances, along with the attention of some of nineteenth-century America's most notable writers-among them Richard Henry Dana Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson-has helped keep the legend alive. This despite evidence that the vessel, whose actual name was the Princess Augusta, was never abandoned, lured ashore, or destroyed by fire. So how did the rumors begin? What really happened to the Princess Augusta and the passengers she carried on her final, fatal voyage? Through years of painstaking research, Jill Farinelli reconstructs the origins of one of New England's most chilling maritime mysteries.

Did you know that horseshoe crabs have been around for 200 million years? That mussels spin long anchor lines and climb steep slopes with them? Do you know what a Beetlebung tree is?

"With his gallery on the wharf and thirty-plus years on the island, Malcolm Greenaway is the Rembrandt of Block Island photographers."

Recounts the stories of the USS Block Island CVE 21 and CVE 106 and their crews, many of whom served on both ships in the Atlantic and Pacific theatres

The Mohegan Bluffs of Block Island were named after a band of Mohegan Indians who came to pillage Manisses Island (Block Island). However, they were destroyed by the local Manissean Indians at the Island's tallest bluffs, located on the Southeast corner of the Island. I have heard many versions of this story over the years. But, even after hearing it for the first time when I was eleven years old, I wondered about how it all happened. Why did the two tribes fight in the first place? What did it look like? Why did they come to fight at that location? Did the Manisseans literally push or throw the Mohegans off the bluffs?This book takes what little documented information is available and pieces together a fictional account of how this action might have taken place.

Hidden History of Rhode Island delivers the best Ocean State stories you've never heard before. Surprising tales and unexpected anecdotes color Rhode Island's legacy, from the accounts of its three brave Titanic survivors to the whirlwind Revolutionary War romance between a Smithfield girl and a French viscount. Rhode Island historian Glenn Laxton uncovers the exceptional citizens whom history has forgotten, like Robert the Hermit, a man who endured three escapes from slavery before finding liberty and peace in Rumford; the illustrious Lippitt family, who spearheaded advancements in deaf education; and Christiana Bannister, a Narragansett tribe member, nineteenth-century entrepreneur and wife to the most successful African American artist of the time. With moments of tragedy, as in the Lexington steamboat disaster, as well as triumph, as in the case of small-town boy turned baseball hero Joe Connolly, Laxton reveals Rhode Island beneath the surface.

Its October 1970. Out of work police detective Duke Jameson is asked to investigate the mysterious deaths of two male students at the University of Rhode Island. As soon as Jameson arrives on campus, hidden forces begin to work against him. A missing professor, a corrupt sheriff, an eccentric millionaire, campus drug pushers, and more than one beautiful woman draw him into the Block Island Mystery