Rhode Island

Rhode Island was founded by a man who got kicked out of Massachusetts for having too many opinions. In 1636, Roger Williams was banished from the colony for insisting the government had no right to tell people how to worship.

He fled into the wilderness in winter. The Narragansett people took him in, and he bought land from them at the tip of Narragansett Bay. He named it Providence and declared it a place where anyone could believe whatever they wanted.

It was the first government in the modern world to keep religion and government completely apart.

The Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples had lived in this area for thousands of years. Williams learned their language and treated them more fairly than most colonists did.

But that respect didn't survive him. In 1675, during a brutal war between colonists and Native peoples called King Philip's War, colonial soldiers attacked a Narragansett fort in the Great Swamp Fight, killing hundreds of men, women, and children.

Rhode Island became a haven for people turned away everywhere else. Baptists, Quakers, and Jewish families all found refuge here. Williams founded the first Baptist church in America in 1638. In 1763, Jewish families in Newport built Touro Synagogue, the oldest surviving synagogue in the country.

But the smallest colony carried a big contradiction. Rhode Island merchants traded rum for enslaved people from Africa and shipped them to the Caribbean. In 1774, it became the first colony to ban the slave trade, though some merchants kept at it illegally for years.

Rhode Islanders also picked fights with the British early. In 1772, a group of colonists burned the British customs ship Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, a full year before the Boston Tea Party. Rhode Island became the first colony to formally declare independence, on May 4, 1776, two months before everyone else.

Tour Touro Synagogue in Newport, then walk the famous Cliff Walk past the giant mansions where some of the richest families in American history spent their summers. Visit the Roger Williams National Memorial in Providence.

Catch WaterFire, when bonfires light up the rivers running through downtown Providence on select nights from spring through fall.