Coverture was the gut punch of systemic injustice behind Abigail Adams' famous 1776 decorous plea to her husband to "Remember the Ladies" and on to Lydia Allen Dorr's 1859 last will and testament - razor sharp in it's language detailing how this American woman might leave her recovered inheritance to her own daughters "free from the power and control of their husbands"… Coverture is not considered at all by historians of the Dorr Rebellion because Lydia Allen Dorr has been ignored as a catalyzing agent of change central to the narrative.

Some stories take centuries to be heard. What seems like a kaleidoscope of hearsay suddenly comes together to form a clear pattern revealing a very different view into the past. For its "Unsolved Mystery" issue Rhode Island Monthly magazine included this unfinished oil portrait of Lydia Allen by the famous Newport-born artist Edward Greene Malbone.

I have long considered cemeteries to be a kind of Facebook of the nineteenth-century. Even my earliest fast take on the Dorr family cemetery plot made me wonder about the laden domestic environment this family brought even to their final resting place. What was that about?

How do the disenfranchised become citizens and join in the project of democracy? Join scholar Nancy Austin in this one hour video lecture from 2021 as she shares her ongoing detective work on the Providence Athenæum’s famous ivory miniature, The Hours, and a possible hidden history on women’s liberty and the vote.