November 04, 2022
Dorr collaboration wins award
Two alumni — Erik Chaput, Ph.D. ’03, ’05G and Russell J. DeSimone ’67 — and the Phillips Memorial Library’s Digital Projects department were honored by the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities with the Public Humanities Scholar Award in September.
The award recognizes outstanding public humanities work in teaching and scholarship that advances the civic and cultural life of Rhode Island. The collaborators were recognized for their Dorr Rebellion Project website, launched in 2011, which established an online educational resource about the Dorr Rebellion (1841–1842), an event that led to the rewriting of the Rhode Island state constitution.
Chaput, who teaches in PC’s School of Continuing Education, has a doctorate in early American history from Syracuse University and is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (University Press of Kansas, 2013). DeSimone, an author and historian, has published many works on the Dorr Rebellion and formerly worked in the defense industry and was an adjunct professor in the library at the University of Rhode Island.
The Dorr Rebellion was an attempt by Thomas Wilson Dorr to bring voting rights to all men of Rhode Island in 1842. The state was using its 1663 colonial charter as a constitution, which meant men had to own land to be able to vote. The rebellion established a parallel government alongside the existing chartered government and wrote a new constitution for Rhode Island. Although the rebellion was crushed militarily, it forced the rewriting of the state constitution to expand voting rights.
The collection includes primary sources, scholarship, bibliographies, a documentary, interviews, and lesson plans for Grades 9-12 that were designed to interact with the website and make use of its letters and gallery pages. Project partners were the John Hay Library at Brown University, the Rhode Island Historical Society, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. Grant funding was provided by the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, Rhode Island Foundation, and Heritage Harbor Foundation.
view the library’s dorr project
