In the closing years of the 19th century, Alice Morse Earle turned her meticulous historian's eye toward Narragansett, Rhode Island, a place where colonial ambition, indigenous heritage, and enslaved labor intertwine. This is not mere antiquarian nostalgia but something sharper: a portrait of a vanished world rendered with affection and clear-sightedness both. Earle traces the rise of the planter families, their grand houses, their complicated relationships with the Narragansett people and the Africans they enslaved. The book weaves actual historical chronicles with romantic tales, and the story of Hannah Robinson, whose love story reveals the iron cage of colonial social convention, stands as the emotional heart. What emerges is a region suspended between pastoral romance and harsh reality: bull-baiting and Sunday meeting houses, imperial governors and enslaved servants, intermarriage and dispossession. Earle writes with the warmth of someone who clearly loves her subject, yet she does not flinch from what that world required. For readers who crave America's hidden histories, who want the past not as sanitized legend but as living, contradictory fact.
