How Rhode Island Got Its Name

when European explorers were sailing up and down the coast of America a man named Giovani De verzano discovered an island and he went wow this reminds me of Roads back in Greece and then he sailed away and didn't write down exactly where he was a Dutch guy called Adrien Block was also exploring 100 years later and found an island and he went wow this island is so red I'm going to call it Red Island or as we say in Dutch rude Island and then he sailed away and didn't write down exactly where he was either hm what a coincidence later on there was this guy called Roger Williams and he wasn't just some nobody a few years earlier he had lived in Massachusetts but was exiled by the puritan leaders because he criticized their rule so he went South and purchased a bunch of land from Native Americans and named it Providence because he believed it was God's Providence that had led him there while he was here he noticed that there was an odd-shaped island off the coast of his Providence plantations and went to investigate Williams helped settlers purchase the island and went to combine the two lands together he learned the natives called it a quid neck when he noticed that the island was possibly the on talked about in the previous accounts by the explorers and said that it should be henceforth known as the Isle of Roads or Road Island this probably suggests he believes in giovan's account that it looked like roads but dropped the s for whatever reason I mean I can kind of see it but also not so he went off to England to get his new Colony chartered and they said yes you can have that and they created the colony of Rhode Island and Providence plantations which then became a state of the USA however verzano describes an island like roads being 10 leagues from the mainland while a quid neck island is basically touching the mainland what the only Island some distance away is Block Island at about 10 mil hang on Block Island like Adrien Block the guy who named a red Island yes in fact verzano did not call the island roads he simply said it looked like roads and in fact he called it Louisa for whatever reason blocks Fame stuck more and the island is now called Block Island however Williams and his buddies decided to Simply ignore this fact or they weren't aware of it because they were confident the roads account was referring to a quid neck I mean how but anyway it's possible they also found a Dutch account and opted to just combine the two because they felt it was too big of a coincidence to pass up no one had ever used the term roads to refer to this island so the state was incorporated with its full name based off the fact that it had two parts Road Island and Providence plantations plus all the other Islands as well but no one really cares about them too much although the Aquidneck Island was officially rad Island many people referred to it by its native name and said Rhode Island to refer to the entire State because no one wanted to say the full name every single time of course the entire state is about 4,000 km while the island is just 98 km but we'll ignore that so the state continued along with this name based off an island that no one called Rhode Island up until 2020 in that year anti-racism was fashionable and it was successfully argued that the word Plantation was racist and voters voted to just call the entire state state of Rhode Island all well and good however this means the entire state is now named for an island not called rad Island and makes no reference to its Mainland while the actual rad island is way off the coast and called Block Island but the settlers just chose to call the land they had Road Island anyway because they were sure they had got it right but could you imagine it being called anything else okay that's the video thanks for watching go watch my other cartoons and subscribe thank you see you bye

Channel: manilpwn

Views: 21,445

Keywords: history, rhode island, providence, colonial, settlers, colonial history, roger williams, rhodes, rhode, aquidneck, usa, america, cartoon, american history, usa history, history cartoon, anime, history anime, history animation, renaissance, renaissance cartoon

Id: YO_foEY-ZSA

Length: 3min 14sec (194 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2024