Everything you wanted to know about Rhode Island and were going to ask anyway

The editors at 101 believe that a place is revealed through the accumulation of detail. It is revealed one fact at a time. You find it in variations in weather and climate, pride in favorite sons and daughters, the local food lingo, and in how people earn a living and amuse themselves.

We’ve made it our job to unearth and marshal those facts so that taken together they reveal a portrait. 101 books are not about restaurant and hotel prices or museum openings. They are books about places. They are books about what makes them tick.

From Narragansett Bay, Roger Williams, the American Industrial Revolution and the Independent Man to the New England mob, the Big Blue Bug, the Newport Mansions, Family Guy and profiles of Buddy Cianci, H.P. Lovecraft and the Farrelly brothers, no book provides a more insightful lowdown on the Ocean State than Rhode Island 101. No book is more fun! Beginning as an unpromising collection of outcasts, malcontents, squatters, and dissenters, followed by a century and a half of internal dissension and external hostility, Rhode Island emerged as a special place.