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Providence was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a theologian exiled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for the radical idea that the government had no business telling people what to believe. He named it after divine providence, and the city has been quietly doing things on its own terms ever since. The first armed resistance to British rule happened here in 1772 with the burning of the revenue schooner Gaspee, a full year before the Boston Tea Party. Rhode Island was the last of the original thirteen states to ratify the Constitution, because it was not entirely sure it wanted to. That independent streak has never fully dissipated.

College Hill on the East Side holds the highest concentration of National Register historic buildings in any neighborhood in the United States.

Brown University moved here in 1770, and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) operates a museum on Benefit Street that contains the 20th-largest art collection in the country. The Rhode Island State House dome, completed in 1904, is the fourth-largest self-supporting marble dome in the world, after the Pantheon, the Basilica of St Peter, and the Minnesota State Capitol. For a city of 190,000 people, Providence has an almost unreasonable density of significant things per square kilometer.