October 31, 2024 – Rhode Island Humanities is excited to launch two new Rhode Tours focused on belonging and community.
Since January, RI Humanities staff have been working in partnership with Community Content Partners to create a new tour, “LGBTQIA+ Histories in Rhode Island,” and curating another tour from existing content, “Creating Home in Rhode Island,” on the ways diverse communities have found refuge, created home, and built legacies that span generations in the Ocean State. These tours deepen public understanding of complex community, state, and national histories. Through the tours, users are introduced to myriad ways that historically and currently marginalized communities demonstrate resilience—and indeed, joy—in the face of hate. In the process, these communities have helped to disarm misunderstanding through the preservation of cultural practices and the insistence on creating safe spaces in often unique ways.
For the “LGBTQIA+ Histories in Rhode Island” tour, RI Humanities worked with three Community Content Partners: Janaya Kizzie, Selene Means, and Mev Miller. We are profoundly grateful for their contributions, insights, and partnership. We also thank Matthew Lawrence and Jason Tranchida for their thoughtful and thorough input on the tour and Casandra Inez, United We Stand Engagement Coordinator, for her dedication to the initiative. We also gratefully acknowledge all the past curators of existing content on the Rhode Tour platform and extend our thanks to Alissa Bateman, Faith Carbon, Geralyn Ducady, and Kathryn Farrington for their time advising on the initiative’s connections to the education and tourism sectors. This digital humanities resource is made stronger through the contributions of all who have engaged with it over the past decade and all who will continue to utilize it in the future.
If you are interested in contributing stories to Rhode Tour on these topics or any others, please contact us at info@rihumanities.org—we will be glad to hear from you.
Development of these tours was supported by “United We Stand: Connecting Through Culture,” a nationwide initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities focused on combating hate-motivated violence.
Rhode Tour is a free mobile app and website that tells stories by and about Rhode Islanders. A joint initiative of Rhode Island Humanities and the Rhode Island Historical Society, Rhode Tour brings mapping technology, sound, images, videos and well-told stories together to engage us in learning about the places we live, work, visit—or perhaps simply pass by—in Rhode Island. The app and website reach over 40,000 users annually and is a critical resource for community-generated, scholarly-reviewed historical and cultural content in the Ocean State for educators, tourists, and locals alike.
