front cover of Taking Sides in Revolutionary New Jersey
Taking Sides in Revolutionary New Jersey
Caught in the Crossfire
Maxine N. Lurie
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The American Revolution in New Jersey lasted eight long years, during which many were caught in the middle of a vicious civil war. Residents living in an active war zone took stands that varied from “Loyalist” to “Patriot” to neutral and/or "trimmer" (those who changed sides for a variety of reasons). Men and women, Blacks and whites, Native Americans, and those from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, with different religious affiliations all found themselves in this difficult middle ground. When taking sides, sometimes family was important, sometimes religion, or political principles; the course of the war and location also mattered. Lurie analyzes the difficulties faced by prisoners of war, the refugees produced by the conflict, and those Loyalists who remained, left as exiles, or surprisingly later returned. Their stories are interesting, often dramatic, and include examples of those literally caught in the crossfire. They illustrate the ways in which this was an extremely difficult time and place to live. In the end more of the war was fought in New Jersey than elsewhere, resulting in the highest number of casualties, and a great deal of physical damage. The costs were high no matter what side individuals took. Taking Sides uses numerous brief biographies to illustrate the American Revolution’s complexity; it quotes from documents, pamphlets, diaries, letters, and poetry, a variety of sources to provide insight into the thoughts and reactions of those living through it all. It focuses on people rather than battles and provides perspective for the difficult choices we make in our own times.

Supplemental Instructor Resources for Taking Sides in Revolutionary New Jersey:
Questions (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/19144155/Taking-Sides-Supplementary-Instructor-Resources-Questions.pdf)
Bibliography (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/19144154/Taking-Sides-Supplementary-Instructor-Resources-Bibliography.pdf)
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front cover of Tales and Towns of Northern New Jersey
Tales and Towns of Northern New Jersey
Beck, Henry
Rutgers University Press, 1967
Long regarded as folklife classics, Henry Charlton Beck's books are vivid recreations of the back roads, small towns, and legends that give New Jersey its special character. Rutgers University Press is pleased to make these important books available again in newly designed editions.
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Taming Manhattan
Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City
Catherine McNeur
Harvard University Press, 2014

George Perkins Marsh Prize, American Society for Environmental History
VSNY Book Award, New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Victorian Society in America
Hornblower Award for a First Book, New York Society Library
James Broussard Best First Book Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

With pigs roaming the streets and cows foraging in the Battery, antebellum Manhattan would have been unrecognizable to inhabitants of today’s sprawling metropolis. Fruits and vegetables came from small market gardens in the city, and manure piled high on streets and docks was gold to nearby farmers. But as Catherine McNeur reveals in this environmental history of Gotham, a battle to control the boundaries between city and country was already being waged, and the winners would take dramatic steps to outlaw New York’s wild side.

“[A] fine book which make[s] a real contribution to urban biography.”
—Joseph Rykwert, Times Literary Supplement

“Tells an odd story in lively prose…The city McNeur depicts in Taming Manhattan is the pestiferous obverse of the belle epoque city of Henry James and Edith Wharton that sits comfortably in many imaginations…[Taming Manhattan] is a smart book that engages in the old­ fashioned business of trying to harvest lessons for the present from the past.”
—Alexander Nazaryan, New York Times

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Temple University
125 Years of Service to Philadelphia, the Nation, and the World
James W. Hilty with Matthew M. Hanson, foreword by Ann Weaver Hart
Temple University Press, 2010
Temple University's alumni number over a quarter million, andinclude entertainment legend Bill Cosby and Shirley Tilghman, the first woman president of Princeton University. One of every eight college graduates in the Philadelphia area received their degrees at Temple. Temple Owls are everywhere!

Temple University: 125 Years of Service to Philadelphia, the Nation, and the World, by noted historian and Temple professor James Hilty offers the first full history of Temple University. Lovingly written and beautifully designed, it presents a rich chronicle from founder Russell Conwell’s vision to democratize, diversify, and broaden the reach of higher education to Temple's present-day status as the twenty-eighth largest university and the fifth largest provider of professional education in the United States. With its state-of-the-art technological capabilities, improved amenities, and new multi-million- dollar facilities, Temple remains at the forefront of America’s modern urban universities.

The book captures Temple’s long record of service to its North Philadelphia neighbors, its global reach to Rome, Tokyo, and beyond, and its development from a rowhouse campus into a lively 11,000- resident urban village—all the while assuring “Access to Excellence.” Along the way, we learn how Temple reacted to and helped shape major developments in the history of American higher education.

Featuring 250 full-color photos, Temple University provides a wonderful keepsake for those who already know the university and will become a valued resource for anyone interested in the urban university. 
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front cover of Tending the Garden State
Tending the Garden State
Preserving Agriculture in New Jersey
Harrison, Charles
Rutgers University Press, 2006

Early in the nineteenth century, an army colonel stood before a crowd at the Salem County Courthouse and ate buckets of tomatoes to prove that they were not poisonous. Ever since, the red vegetable of summer has played a starring role in New Jersey’s history.  Although today visitors to the state are more likely to see smoke-spewing factories than acres of farmland or grazing cattle, the state’s legacy of agriculture and farming continues, and extends far beyond the popular Jersey tomato.

In Tending the Garden State, Charles Harrison tells the story of the state’s rich agricultural history from the time when Leni-Lenape Indians scratched the earth with primitive tools up through today.  He recalls New Jersey’s rural past, traces the evolution of farming over the course of the twentieth century, and explains innovative approaches to protecting the industry.

Drawing on interviews with farmers, as well as researchers, professional planners, designers, and architects, Harrison discovers that despite the discouraging spread of suburban sprawl, the Garden State’s farming legacy is not as endangered as it may seem.  Many residents care deeply about preserving New Jersey’s agricultural industry and are making great strides to keep the tradition alive for future generations. Some of these protective measures include new laws that encourage the conservation of land and research devoted to helping farmers make the most of their limited acreage.  Innovative techniques such as high-tunnel farming, together with the growth of some very profitable farm specializations, such as turf grass, aquaculture, horticulture, and wine making, will enable farmers to remain active and successful in the state’s oldest industry.

Anyone interested in New Jersey’s history or, more broadly, in the history of American agriculture, will be delighted by Harrison’s engaging and readable account of farming in the Garden State.

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front cover of There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos
There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos
Mappen, Marc
Rutgers University Press, 2009
An American tourist in Europe stopped at a restaurant in Gdansk, Poland, and struck up a conversation with a local. "Where do you come from?" he asked. "New Jersey," she said. He smiled and replied, "Ah, Sopranos!"

Even fans of that popular show, one that held viewers captive, may be a bit disheartened to discover that the first thing that pops into minds around the world about New Jersey is a dysfunctional crime family, just an exit or two off the infamous N.J. Turnpike. But there's no need to live in fear that the only culture and history that the state is known for is, well, let's say, a bit of bada bing. Actually, the echo of the Big Bangùthe cosmic event that marked the birth of our universe some 13.7 billion years agoùwas first identified by scientists from Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey.

In this lively romp through history from the primitive past to the present day, Marc Mappen's message resonatesùThere's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos. Real tales, wise tales, tall tales abound throughout the pages of Mappen's collection, filled with zest, humor, scandal, and occasionally tragedy. Annie Oakley. Ulysses S. Grant. Benedict Arnold. Ezra Pound. Shoeless Joe Jackson. These luminaries and many others share a common bond with the state that witnessed prehistoric elephants roaming its pastures, the explosion on the USS Princeton, a Martian invasion, famous firsts like the phonograph, electric light, and movies, and, well, step aside Tony Soprano: mobster Al Capone strolling along the Atlantic City boardwalk.

Providing a lens into American history through lively prose and more than twenty-five illustrations, There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos is as much fun as a trip to the Jersey Shore and definitely more rewarding than a night home watching televisionù simply stated, this book is one you can't refuse to read.

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This Is New Jersey
Cunningham, John T
Rutgers University Press, 1995
The extraordinary diversity of New Jersey is captured in this revised and up-to-date edition of This Is New Jersey, for forty years a classic and one of the most popular books ever written about the state. History, current problems, and opportunities for the future are skillfully blended in a book that makes it clear that there is a lot more to the state than can be imagined by those who speed through it on any of New Jersey's numerous interstates or railways. Ranking forty-sixth in size, but sixth in population, New Jersey is the most urban and densely populated of the fifty states. In spite of that, the state truly deserves its nickname, Garden State, and it has a large recreation industry. John T. Cunningham examines the state county by county from the hill country to the city belt; from the dairy farms to the Jersey shore. Historically, settlement in New Jersey goes back to the Lenni Lenape Indians, to the colonists, and to the state's place as the crossroads of the American Revolution. To those who do not know the state's byways and quiet towns, it appears that highways abound. Yet there are also many thousands of acres of precious woodland preserved by park commissions in Essex and Union counties. In northern New Jersey alone, there are more than a million acres of hardwood forests. In southern New Jersey, over a million acres of the fascinating Pinelands account for almost a quarter of the total state area. New Jersey is a land of lakes and mountains, of fishing docks and two-hundred-year-old houses, of farms and factories, of old universities and new commuting towns. This fourth edition retains the popular pictures of each county courthouse, the heart of county history andadministration. This fully redesigned edition is enhanced by several four-color and over 100 black-and-white illustrations by noted New Jersey photographer Walter Choroszewski.
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front cover of Thunder In the Mountains
Thunder In the Mountains
The West Virginia Mine War, 1920–21
Lon Savage
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990

The West Virginia mine war of 1920–21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the US Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.

The civil war began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking miners against agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who attempted to evict the miners from company-owned housing. Thunder in the Mountains was the first book-length account of this crisis in American industrial relations and governance, much neglected in historical accounts.

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front cover of To Risk It All
To Risk It All
General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country
Michael McConnell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023
General John Forbes’s campaign against Fort Duquesne was the largest over-land expedition during the Seven Years’ War in America. While most histories of the time period include the Forbes Campaign as an aside, McConnell documents how and why Forbes and his army succeeded, and what his success meant to the subsequent history of the mid-Atlantic colonies, native inhabitants of the Ohio Country, and the empire he represented.

A close look at the Forbes Campaign and its personnel reveals much about both British relations with native peoples and the nature of Britain’s American empire during a time of stress. Unlike other campaigns, this one was composed largely of colonial—not professional British—troops. In addition, individual colonies negotiated their role in the campaign and frequently placed their own local interests ahead of those of the empire as a whole. The campaign thus suggests the limits of imperial power and how Britain’s hold over its American frontiers was, at best, tenuous and helped lead to an eventual break-down of empire in the 1760s and 1770s.
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front cover of Toward a Healthier Garden State
Toward a Healthier Garden State
Beyond Cancer Clusters and COVID
Michael R. Greenberg
Rutgers University Press, 2023
While New Jersey now frequently appears near the top in listings of America’s healthiest states, this has not always been the case. The fluctuations in the state’s overall levels of health have less to do with the lifestyle choices of individual residents and more to do with broader structural issues, ranging from pollution to urban design to the consolidation of the health care industry. 
 
This book uses the past fifty years of New Jersey history as a case study to illustrate just how much public policy decisions and other upstream factors can affect the health of a state’s citizens. It reveals how economic and racial disparities in health care were exacerbated by bad policies regarding everything from zoning to education to environmental regulation. The study further chronicles how New Jersey struggled to deal with public health crises like the AIDS epidemic and the crack epidemic. Yet it also explores how the state has developed some of the nation’s most innovative responses to public health challenges, and then provides policy suggestions for how we might build an even healthier New Jersey.
 
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front cover of A Town Without Steel
A Town Without Steel
Envisioning Homestead
Judith Modell
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998

In 1986, with little warning, the USX Homestead Works closed. Thousands of workers who depended on steel to survive were left without work. A Town Without Steel looks at the people of Homestead as they reinvent their views of household and work and place in this world.  The book details the modifications and revisions of domestic strategies in a public crisis.  In some ways unique, and in some ways typical of American industrial towns, the plight of Homestead sheds light on social, cultural, and political developments of the late twentieth century.  

In this anthropological and photographic account of a town facing the crisis of deindustrialization, A Town Without Steel focuses on families.  Reminiscent of Margaret Byington and Lewis Hine’s approach in Homestead,  Charlee Brodsky’s photographs document the visual dimension of change in Homestead.  The mill that dominated the landscape transformed to a vast, empty lot; a crowded commercial street turns into a ghost town; and an abundance of well-kept homes become an abandoned street of houses for sale.  The individual narratives and family snapshots, Modell’s interpretations, and Brodsky’s photographs all evoke the tragedy and the resilience of a town whose primary source of self-identification no longer exists.   

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front cover of The Transformation of the Avant-Garde
The Transformation of the Avant-Garde
The New York Art World, 1940-1985
Diana Crane
University of Chicago Press, 1987
With the rise of Abstract Expressionism, New York City became the acknowledged center of the avant-garde. Diana Crane documents the transformation of the New York art world between 1940 and 1985, both in the artistic styles that emerged during this period and the expansion of the number and types of institutions that purchased and displayed various works.

Crane's account is built around discussions of seven styles: Abstract Expressionism in the forties; Pop art and Minimalism in the sixties; Figurative painting, Photorealism, and Pattern painting in the early seventies; and Neo-Expressionism in the early eighties. Demonstrating that the New York art world moved toward increasing acceptance of dominant American cultural trends, Crane offers a fascinating look not only at the intricacies of New York's artistic inner circle but also at the sociology of work and professions, the economics of culture markets such as "dealing art," and the sociology of culture.
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front cover of Translingual Inheritance
Translingual Inheritance
Language Diversity in Early National Philadelphia
Elizabeth Kimball
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021
Honorable Mention, Rhetoric Society of America Book Award

Translingual Inheritance tells a new story of the early days of democracy in the United States, when English had not yet become the only dominant language. Drawing on translingual theory, which exposes how language use contrasts with the political constructions of named languages, Elizabeth Kimball argues that Philadelphians developed complex metalinguistic conceptions of what language is and how it mattered in their relations. In-depth chapters introduce the democratically active communities of Philadelphia between 1750 and 1830 and introduce the three most populous: Germans, Quakers (the Society of Friends), and African Americans. These communities had ways of knowing and using their own languages to create identities and serve the common good outside of English. They used these practices to articulate plans and pedagogies for schools, exercise their faith, and express the promise of the young democracy. Kimball draws on primary sources and archival texts that have been little seen or considered to show how citizens consciously took on the question of language and its place in building their young country and how such practice is at the root of what made democracy possible.
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front cover of A Traveler's Guide to Historic Western Pennsylvania
A Traveler's Guide to Historic Western Pennsylvania
Lois Mulkearn
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1953
This book presents a county-by-county guide to historic landmarks in western Pennsylvania, and how to reach them. Twenty-seven counties are included, along with maps of each. Along the way, travelers will find historic forts, residences of leading citizens, old iron furnaces, grist mills, churches, inns, taverns, tanneries, and many other intriguing places. Historians Lois Mulkearn and Edwin V. Pugh personally visited each site, and provide background vignettes on them, offering interesting facts and highlights gathered from archival documents.
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front cover of Tripping on the Color Line
Tripping on the Color Line
Black-White Multiracial Families in a Racially Divided World
Dalmage, Heather M
Rutgers University Press, 2000

At the turn of the twentieth century W.E.B. DuBois predicted that the central problem facing the United States in the new century would be that of the “color line.” Now, at the beginning of a new century, we find many people straddling the color line. These people come from the growing number of multiracial families in America, families who search for places of comfort and familiarity in a racially polarized society whose educational system, places of worship, and neighborhoods continue to suffer a de facto segregation. This group has provoked an ever-widening debate and an upheaval in traditional racial thinking in the United States.

            Through in-depth interviews with individuals from black–white multiracial families, and insightful sociological analysis, Heather M. Dalmage examines the challenges faced by people living in such families and explores how their experiences demonstrate the need for rethinking race in America. She examines the lived reality of race in the ways multiracial family members construct and describe their own identities and sense of community and politics. She shows how people whose own very lives complicate the idea of the color line must continually negotiate and contest it in order not to reproduce it. Their lack of language to describe their multiracial existence, along with their experience of coping with racial ambiguity and with institutional demands to conform to a racially divided, racist system is the central theme of Tripping on the Color Line. By connecting the stories to specific issues, such as census categories, transracial adoption, intermarriage, as well as the many social responses to violations of the color line, Dalmage raises the debate to a broad discussion on racial essentialism and social justice.

            Exploring the dynamic of race as it pervades the lives of those close to the color line, Dalmage argues that the struggle for racial justice must include an understanding that race is a complex construct that is constantly shifting, and is something we do rather than something we simply are.

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front cover of Triumphant Capitalism
Triumphant Capitalism
Henry Clay Frick and the Industrial Transformation of America
Kenneth Warren
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000
A detailed, carefully wrought business biography of Henry Clay Frick, one of the leading entrepreneurs in American heavy industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Kenneth Warren has provided not only insight into the life of Henry Clay Frick, but a major contribution to our understanding of the history of the basic industries, the shaping of society, locality, and region - and thereby of laying the foundations for the value systems and landscapes of present-day America.
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front cover of Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume One
Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume One
Government, Business, and Environmental Change
Roy Lubove
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
Roy Lubove's Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh is a pioneering analysis of elite driven, post-World War II urban renewal in a city once disdained as "hell with the lid off." The book continues to be invaluable to anyone interested in the fate of America's beleaguered metropolitan and industrial centers.                         
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front cover of Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume Two
Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh, Volume Two
The Post-Steel Era
Roy Lubove
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996
This volume traces the major decisions, events, programs, and personalities that transformed the city of Pittsburgh during its urban renewal project, which began in 1977. Roy Lubove demonstrates how the city showed united determination to attract high technology companies in an attempt to reverse the economic fallout from the decline of the local steel industry. Lubove also separates the successes from the failures, the good intentions from the actual results.
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front cover of Twin Towers
Twin Towers
Gillespie, Angus K
Rutgers University Press, 1999

A readable account of both the history of the construction of the Twin Towers and the life of the people who work there.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are more than office buildings. They are symbols of America, just as the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben represent their countries. Commissioned in 1962 and completed in 1976, these edifices are still the tallest man-made structures in New York City. Indeed, the builders intended the towers to make a statement about the importance of the Port of New York and New Jersey. The complex rises like Emerald City, with fountains and sculpture from what was once a dilapidated area of half-abandoned stores.

          Folklorist Angus Gillespie takes us on a tour that goes back in time and continues to the present day. He recounts the political maneuvering necessary to get the State of New Jersey to agree to situate the project at its present location. Deftly presenting portraits of the men responsible for mooring the World Trade Center at its present location, Gillespie provides ample evidence that the World Trade Center backers were “second to none in self promotion.”

Twin Towers also demonstrates how engineers prepared the site and solved complex problems (wind patterns, elevator placement, ground-water complications) in order to erect the towers, each with 110 stories. And he discusses the contrast between the architectural community’s almost universal disdain for the towers’ design and the public’s enthusiastic acceptance of the buildings as a symbol of New York.

There is more to the Twin Towers than its architecture, however. People give this complex life, purpose, vibrancy, Gillespie points out. The World Trade Center houses more than 400 businesses and organizations from some 60 different countries engaged in a broad range of international business activities. Through his numerous first-hand interviews conducted with the people who daily work there, Gillespie vividly portrays the world of bankers, shippers, freight forwarders, and traders. With skill and insight, he captures what happens during a normal 24-hour day in the Twin Towers, starting with early morning food deliveries and ending with the patrols of nighttime security guards.

          Twin Towers is both a fitting tribute and careful analysis of one of the most resonating symbols in American culture.

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