Separate Paths: Lenapes and Colonists in West New Jersey is the first cross-cultural study of European colonization in the region south of the Falls of the Delaware River (now Trenton). Lenape men and women welcomed their allies, the Swedes and Finns, to escape more rigid English regimes on the west bank of the Delaware, offering land to establish farms, share resources, and trade. In the 1670s, Quaker men and women challenged this model with strategies to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Though the Lenapes remained sovereign and “old settlers” retained their Swedish Lutheran religion and ethnic autonomy, the West Jersey proprietors had considerable success in excluding Lenapes from their land. The Friends believed God favored their endeavor with epidemics of smallpox and other European diseases that destroyed Lenape families and communities. Affluent Quakers also introduced enslavement of imported Africans and Natives—and the violence that sustained it—to a colony they had promoted with the liberal West New Jersey Concessions of 1676-77. Thus, they defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict, equality of everyone before God, and the golden rule to treat others as you wish to be treated. Despite mutual commitment to peace by Lenapes, old settlers, and Friends, Quaker colonization had similar results to military conquests of Natives by English in Virginia and New England, and Dutch in the Hudson Valley and northern New Jersey. Still, in alliance with old settlers, Lenape communities survived in areas outside the focus of English colonization, in the Pine Barrens, upper reaches of streams, and Atlantic shore.

In Smile, Alan A. Siegel chronicles the evolution of Olympic Park from a den of hedonism and intoxication in the 1880s into Essex County's most popular family entertainment site in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the fifty-year reign of Newark brewer Henry A. Guenther, millions of men, women, and children passed under the signs Smile and Learn to Play into what the legendary beer baron called a little bit of Coney Island, the circus, an old-fashioned beer garden, and Monte Carlo rolled into one. With its myriad games, attractions, performances, and restaurants, it was impossible to walk away from the park unsatisfied and not wishing for a return. Though the doors to Olympic Park have been closed for thirty years, it will forever reside in the memories of many as a towering monument on the cultural landscape of New Jersey in a simpler, more innocent, and less affluent time.

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."

Did you know that New Jersey spearheaded the discovery of antibiotics? Or that the Garden State had the first state hospital serving the mentally ill and the first community rescue squad? And did you know that close to a million people around the world can walk again, thanks to the New Jersey Knee?

New Jersey is a small state that has played a big role in the history of medicine. Adrenalin, streptomycin, pure milk, tranquilizers, malaria control, cortisone, vitamins, revelations of radium's dangers—New Jersey’s impressive contributions to American health have been on display in a major traveling exhibition, “A State of Health: New Jersey’s Medical Heritage.” By 2002, more than twelve sites throughout New Jersey and Philadelphia will have hosted this display.

This catalogue to the exhibition celebrates more than four centuries of New Jersey medicine through original essays and 150-plus striking illustrations of artifacts, manuscripts, books, photographs, works of art, and postcards. Taking subjects of perennial interest—epidemics, children’s health, public health, hospitals, and biomedical research—curator Karen Reeds explores the state’s rich medical heritage and its uniqueplace as the heart of the world’s pharmaceutical industry.

Engagingly written and handsomely produced, A State of Health: New Jersey’s

Medical Heritage is at once a lasting resource for students, teachers, and historians and the perfect gift to your favorite healthcare professional or local history buff.

While many Civil War reference books exist, there is no single compendium that contains important details about the combatant states (and territories) that Civil War researchers can readily access for their work. People looking for information about the organizations, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Civil War States and state governments must assemble data from a variety of sources, with many key sources remaining unavailable online. This crucial reference book, the fourth in the States at War series, provides vital information on the organization, activities, economies, demographics, and prominent personalities of Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey during the Civil War. Its principal sources include the Official Records, state adjutant-general reports, legislative journals, state and federal legislation, federal and state executive speeches and proclamations, and the general and special orders issued by the military authorities of both governments, North and South. Designed and organized for easy use by professional historians and amateurs, this book can be read in two ways: by individual state, with each chapter offering a stand-alone history of an individual state’s war years; or across states, comparing reactions to the same event or solutions to the same problems.

In this provocative book, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark challenge popular perceptions about American religion. They view the religious environment as a free market economy, where churches compete for souls. The story they tell is one of gains for upstart sects and losses for mainline denominations. Although many Americans assume that religious participation has declined in America, Finke and Stark present a different picture. In 1776, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans were active in church affairs. Today, church membership includes about 6 out of 10 people. But, as Finke and Stark show, not all denominations benefited from this growth. They explain how and why the leading eighteenth-century churches began their descent, while two newcomer sects, the Baptists and the Methodists, gained ground. They also analyze why the Methodists then began a long, downward slide, why the Baptists continued to succeed, how the Catholic Church met the competition of ardent Protestant missionaries, and why the Catholic commitment has declined since Vatican II. The authors also explain why ecumenical movements always fail. In short, Americans are not abandoning religion; they have been moving away from established denominations. A "sect-church process" is always under way, Finke and Stark argue, as successful churches lose their organizational vigor and are replaced by less worldly groups. Some observers assert that the rise in church membership rates indicates increased participation, not increased belief. Finke and Stark challenge this as well. They find that those groups that have gained the greatest numbers have demanded that their followers accept traditional doctrines and otherworldliness. They argue thatreligious organizations can thrive only when they comfort souls and demand sacrifice. When theology becomes too logical, or too secular, it loses people.

Vacant lots. Historic buildings overgrown with weeds. Walls and alleyways covered with graffiti. These are sights associated with countless inner-city neighborhoods in America, and yet many viewers have trouble getting beyond the surface of such images, whether they are denigrating them as signs of a dangerous ghetto or romanticizing them as traits of a beautiful ruined landscape. The Street: A Field Guide to Inequality provides readers with the critical tools they need to go beyond such superficial interpretations of urban decay. 
 
Using MacArthur fellow Camilo José Vergara’s intimate street photographs of Camden, New Jersey as reference points, the essays in this collection analyze these images within the context of troubled histories and misguided policies that have exacerbated racial and economic inequalities. Rather than blaming Camden’s residents for the blighted urban landscape, the multidisciplinary array of scholars contributing to this guide reveal the oppressive structures and institutional failures that have led the city to this condition. Tackling topics such as race and law enforcement, gentrification, food deserts, urban aesthetics, credit markets, health care, childcare, and schooling, the contributors challenge conventional thinking about what we should observe when looking at neighborhoods.

Drawing from almost a decade of ethnographic research in largely Brazilian and Puerto Rican neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey, Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, in Street Therapists,examines how affect, emotion, and sentiment serve as waypoints for the navigation of interracial relationships among US-born Latinos, Latin American migrants, blacks, and white ethnics. Tackling a rarely studied dynamic approach to affect, Ramos-Zayas offers a thorough—and sometimes paradoxical—new articulation of race, space, and neoliberalism in US urban communities.

After looking at the historical, political, and economic contexts in which an intensified connection between affect and race has emerged in Newark, New Jersey, Street Therapists engages in detailed examinations of  various community sites—including high schools, workplaces, beauty salons, and funeral homes, among others—and secondary sites in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and San Juan to uncover the ways US-born Latinos and Latin American migrants interpret and analyze everyday racial encounters through a language of psychology and emotions. As Ramos-Zayas notes, this emotive approach to race resurrects Latin American and Caribbean ideologies of “racial democracy” in an urban US context—and often leads to new psychological stereotypes and forms of social exclusion. Extensively researched and thoughtfully argued, Street Therapists theorizes the conflictive connection between race, affect, and urban neoliberalism.  

When people think of the hottest cities of the Jazz Age and Swing Era, New York, Nashville, New Orleans, Memphis, Kansas City, and Chicago immediately spring to mind. But Newark, New Jersey was just as happening as each of these towns. On any given evening, you could listen to a legendary singer like Sarah Vaughan or laugh at the celebrated comedy of Red Foxx. Newark was a veritable maze of thriving theaters, clubs, and after-hours joints where the sporting folks rambled through the night. There were plenty of jobs for musicians and entertainers, so the city was teaming with musical talent.

Swing City reveals Newark’s role as an undocumented entertainment mecca between 1922 and 1950. The book is based on interviews with musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, bartenders, waitresses, nightclub owners, and their families and is heavily illustrated with rare photographs from the author’s personal collection. Barbara J. Kukla presents a musical tour of the city, covering the vaudeville acts, the musicians who started at Newark’s Orpheum Theater and went on to join famous bands, and the teenage dancers who started as chorus girls and eventually toured with famous tap dancers. She also describes the house rent parties of the 1930s, the “colored only” clubs, the entertainment at Newark’s 1,000 saloons during Prohibition, and the Coleman Hotel where Billie Holiday often stayed. Throughout the book, which concentrates on performers’ lives and personalities, Kukla discusses music and other forms of entertainment as social and economic survival tools in Newark’s Third Ward during a time of ruthless segregation.

Swing City includes several appendixes that provide a virtual “Who’s Who” of 25 years of nightlife activities in Newark. Music and nostalgia buffs, students of African American history, and anyone who’s ever been to Newark will find in this bookfabulous entertainment.