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Since the 1890s, New Jersey has attracted hundreds of thousands of Caribbean and Latin American migrants. The state’s rich economic history, high-income suburbs, and strong public sector have all contributed to attracting, retaining, and setting the stage for Latin American and Caribbean immigrants and secondary-step migrants from New York City. Since the 1980s, however, Latinos have developed a more complex presence in the state’s political landscape and institutions. The emergence of Latino-majority towns and cities and coalition politics facilitated the election of Latino mayors, council persons, and many social and community leaders, as well as the election of statewide officers. This collection brings together innovative and empirically grounded scholarship from different disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of study and addresses topics including the demographic history of Latinos in the state, Latino migration from gateway cities to suburban towns, Latino urban enclaves, Latino economic and social mobility, Latino students and education, the New Jersey Dream Act and in-state tuition act organizing, Latinos and criminal justice reform, Latino electoral politics and leadership, and undocumented communities. 

Contributors: Yamil Avivi; Jennifer Ayala; Ulla D. Berg; Giovani Burgos; Elsa Candelario; Laura Curran; Lilia Fernández; Ismael García Colón; Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim; Benjamin Lapidus; Aldo A. Lauria Santiago; Johana Londoño; Kathleen Lopez; Giancarlo Muschi; Melanie Z. Plasencia; Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas; Elena Sabogal; Raymond Sanchez Mayers; William Suárez Gómez; Alex F. Trillo; Daniela Valdez; Anil Venkatesh; Lyna L. Wiggins

Bruce Springsteen might be the quintessential American rock musician but his songs have resonated with fans from all walks of life and from all over the world. This unique collection features reflections from a diverse array of writers who explain what Springsteen means to them and describe how they have been moved, shaped, and challenged by his music.
 
Contributors to Long Walk Home include novelists like Richard Russo, rock critics like Greil Marcus and Gillian Gaar, and other noted Springsteen scholars and fans such as A. O. Scott, Peter Ames Carlin, and Paul Muldoon. They reveal how Springsteen’s albums served as the soundtrack to their lives while also exploring the meaning of his music and the lessons it offers its listeners. The stories in this collection range from the tale of how “Growin’ Up” helped a lonely Indian girl adjust to life in the American South to the saga of a group of young Australians who turned to Born to Run to cope with their country’s 1975 constitutional crisis. These essays examine the big questions at the heart of Springsteen’s music, demonstrating the ways his songs have resonated for millions of listeners for nearly five decades.
 
Commemorating the Boss’s seventieth birthday, Long Walk Home explores Springsteen’s legacy and provides a stirring set of testimonials that illustrate why his music matters.

When Ray Didinger was a young sports columnist, his proud grandfather would tape his articles on the mirror of his Southwest Philadelphia bar and tell his customers, “Look what the kid wrote today.” That phrase is now the title of Didinger’s latest book, a fond look back on his award-winning career.

In Look What the Kid Wrote Today, Didinger reflects on walking the historic Merion golf course with Jack Nicklaus, shooting pool with Mean Joe Greene, touring Foxcatcher Farms with John du Pont and hanging out with Mark Wahlberg on the set of Invincible. He also writes about helping to heal the rift between the Philadelphia Eagles and arguably their greatest player, Chuck Bednarik. It is a story that went untold until now.

Didinger takes the reader through the many stages of his fifty-plus years in sports media, from his time as an Emmy Award-winning producer at NFL Films, which involved writing scripts for the likes of Tom Selleck, Gary Busey, and Oscar winner James Coburn. Now a playwright, Didinger also devotes a chapter to the 2025 premiere of his critically acclaimed production Spinner.

Candid and insightful, Look What the Kid Wrote Today is Didinger at his best.

A twelve-lane behemoth cutting through the least scenic parts of the Garden State, the New Jersey Turnpike may lack the romantic allure of highways like Route 66, but it might just be a more accurate symbol of American life, representing the nation at both its best and its worst. 
 
When Angus Gillespie and Michael Rockland wrote Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1989, they simply wanted to express their fascination with a road that many commuters regarded with annoyance or indifference. Little did they expect that it would be hailed as a classic, listed by the state library alongside works by Whitman and Fitzgerald as one of the ten best books ever written about New Jersey or by a New Jerseyan. 
 
Now Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike is back in a special updated and expanded edition, examining how this great American motorway has changed over the past thirty-five years. You’ll learn how the turnpike has become an icon inspiring singers and poets. And you’ll meet the many people it has affected, including the homeowners displaced by its construction, the highway patrol and toll-takers who work on it, and the drivers who speed down its lanes every day. 

The lives built by Black Americans in a pair of summer resort towns

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, northern resort towns were in their heyday as celebrated retreats for America's wealthy. Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August documents the experiences of African Americans in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island--towns that provided a recurring season of expanded employment opportunities, enhanced social life, cosmopolitan experience, and, in a good year, enough money to last through the winter.

Affirming that the decision to live in their tiny resort communities was conscious and deliberate, Myra B. Young Armstead shows how Afro-Saratogians and Afro-Newporters organized their rhythms, their routines, and their communities to create meaningful identities for themselves. Living on streets close to their churches, developing social organizations that promoted their standards of gentility and respectability, and lobbying for wider opportunities, these African Americans actively shaped their lives within the structures and limitations imposed on them.

Armstead situates the resort town between the poles of the rural South and the large industrial cities of the North. She shows how these small northern towns, with their seasonal economic rhythms and domestic wage work, permitted an important continuity between rural and urban lifestyles and a path from rural South to urban North besides the jarring, disruptive journey that often ended in the ghetto.

"Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August" tells a story that is at once American and uniquely African American: a story of economic imperatives and enlarged social aspirations culminating in a season--June, July, and August--that brought Blacks as close as they could get to the American Dream.