front cover of Liberated
Liberated
The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun
Kaz Rowe
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2023
Courageous Surrealist artist Claude Cahun championed freedom at every turn, from rejecting gender norms and finding queer love to risking death to sabotage the Nazis.

At the turn of the twentieth century in Nantes, France, Lucy Schwob met Suzanne Malherbe, and lightning struck. The two became partners both artistically and romantically and transformed themselves into the creative personas Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. Together, the couple embarked on a radical journey of Surrealist collaboration that would take them from conservative provincial France to the vibrancy of 1920s Paris to the oppression of Nazi-occupied Jersey during World War II, where they used art to undermine the Nazi regime.

Cahun and Moore challenged gender roles and championed freedom at a time when strict societal norms meant that the truth of their relationship had to remain secret. Featuring ten photographs by Cahun and Moore, this graphic biography by cartoonist Kaz Rowe brings Cahun’s inspiring story to life.

Ages thirteen to eighteen
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Murdered in Jersey
Expanded Edition
Gerald Tomlinson
Rutgers University Press, 1994
The Lindbergh kidnapping, the Dutch Schultz murder, the Hurricane Carter case, the Edgard Smith affair involving William F. Buckley, Jr., the slaying of the List family, the shooting of Trooper Philip Lamonaco, the contract killing of Maria Marshall, and the kidnapping and murder of Exxon executive Sidney Reso-all America followed with fascination these terrible crimes committed in New Jersey. These famous New Jersey cases--and fifty-two others, all front-page news in their day--are presented colorfully and concisely in Gerald Tomlinson's Murdered in Jersey, an illustrated look at homicide in the Garden State. For all true crime buffs in and out of New Jersey.
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New Brunswick, New Jersey
The Decline and Revitalization of Urban America
Listokin, David
Rutgers University Press, 2016
While many older American cities struggle to remain vibrant, New Brunswick has transformed itself, adapting to new forms of commerce and a changing population, and enjoying a renaissance that has led many experts to cite this New Jersey city as a model for urban redevelopment. Featuring more than 100 remarkable photographs and many maps, New Brunswick, New Jersey explores the history of the city since the seventeenth century, with an emphasis on the dramatic changes of the past few decades.
 
Using oral histories, archival materials, census data, and surveys, authors David Listokin, Dorothea Berkhout, and James W. Hughes illuminate the decision-making and planning process that led to New Brunswick’s dramatic revitalization, describing the major redevelopment projects that demonstrate the city’s success in capitalizing on funding opportunities. These projects include the momentous decision of Johnson & Johnson to build its world headquarters in the city, the growth of a theater district, the expansion of Rutgers University into the downtown area, and the destruction and rebuilding of public housing. But while the authors highlight the positive effects of the transformation, they also explore the often heated controversies about demolishing older neighborhoods and ask whether new building benefits residents. Shining a light on both the successes and failures in downtown revitalization, they underscore the lessons to be learned for national urban policy, highlighting the value of partnerships, unwavering commitment, and local leadership. 
 
Today, New Brunswick’s skyline has been dramatically altered by new office buildings, residential towers, medical complexes, and popular cultural centers. This engaging volume explores the challenges facing urban America, while also providing a specific case study of a city’s quest to raise its economic fortunes and retool its economy to changing needs.
 
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front cover of Snowshoeing Through Sewers
Snowshoeing Through Sewers
Adventures in New York City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia
Michael Aaron Rockland
Rutgers University Press, 2008
When Daniel Boone heard a neighbor's dog bark, he moved West. But when there's no Wild West left, where is adventure to be found? Michael Aaron Rockland looks for adventure in the megalopolis, "not where no one has been but where no one wishes to go . . . across traffic-clogged cities, the parking lots of wall-to-wall suburban malls, and the sinister waterways that seep through rusting industrial sites."

In these ten alternately poetic and comic tales of adventure in the New York/Philadelphia corridor, the most densely populated chunk of America, Rockland walks and bikes areas meant only for cars and paddles through waters capable of dissolving canoes. He hikes the length of New York's Broadway, camps in New York City, treks across Philadelphia, pedals among the tractor trailers of Route 1 in New Jersey, and paddles around Manhattan and through the dark tunnels under Trenton.

Whereas Henry David Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond to get out of town, for Rockland, the challenge is to head into town. As he writes, "in the late twentieth century, a weed and trash-filled city lot . . . may be a better place than the wilderness to contemplate one's relationship to nature."
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front cover of Zion on the Hudson
Zion on the Hudson
Dutch New York and New Jersey in the Age of Revivals
Fabend, Firth Haring
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Winner of the 2001 New Jersey Author's Award by the New Jersey Academic Alliance

The Dutch came to the New World in the seventeenth century as explorers and traders, but religion soon followed, for it was accepted in the Netherlands that state and church were mutually benefited by advancing the “true Christian religion.” The influence of “Dutchness”—defined here as loyalty to what are presumed to be the distinctive qualities of Dutch national character and culture—persisted in New York and New Jersey for more than 200 years after Dutch emigration ended. Why?

Firth Haring Fabend finds the explanation in the devotion of the Reformed Dutch Church membership to the doctrines and traditions of their church. She looks at the individual and personal beliefs and behaviors of this often-neglected ethnic group. Thus, Zion on the Hudson presents both a broad and an intimate look at the way one mainstream Protestant denomination dealt with the transformative events of the evangelical era.

As Fabend describes the efforts of the Dutch to preserve the European standards and traditions of their church, while developing a taste for a new kind of theology and a preference for an American identity, she documents how Dutchness finally became a historical memory. The Americanization of the Reformed Dutch Church, Fabend writes, is a microcosm of the story of the Americanization of the United States itself.

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