Results by title

Necessarily Black is an ethnographic account of second-generation Cape Verdean youth identity in the United States and a theoretical attempt to broaden and complicate current discussions about race and racial identity in the twenty-first century. P. Khalil Saucier grapples with the performance, embodiment, and nuances of racialized identities (blackened bodies) in empirical contexts. He looks into the durability and (in)flexibility of race and racial discourse through an imbricated and multidimensional understanding of racial identity and racial positioning. In doing so, Saucier examines how Cape Verdean youth negotiate their identity within the popular fabrication of “multiracial America.” He also explores the ways in which racial blackness has come to be lived by Cape Verdean youth in everyday life and how racialization feeds back into the experience of these youth classified as black through a matrix of social and material settings. Saucier examines how ascriptions of blackness and forms of black popular culture inform subjectivities. The author also examines hip-hop culture to see how it is used as a site where new (and old) identities of being, becoming, and belonging are fashioned and reworked. Necessarily Black explores race and how Cape Verdean youth think and feel their identities into existence, while keeping in mind the dynamics and politics of racialization, mixed-race identities, and anti-blackness.

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.

 

This anthology contains seventeen essays covering eighteenth-century agrarian unrest, the Revolutionary War, politics in the Jackson era, feminism and the women's movements, slavery from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, strikes and labor struggles, land use and regional planning issues, Blacks in Newark, the current political state of New Jersey, and more. The contributors are Michal R. Belknap, Lynn W. Dorsett, Gregory Evans Dowd, Charles E. Funnell, Steve Golin, Maxine N. Lurie, Richard P. McCormick, Gary Mitchell, Simeon F. Moss, Marie Marmo Mullaney, Mary R. Murrin, Gerald M. Pomper, Clement A. Price, Thomas L. Purvis, Daniel Schaffer, Warren E. Stickle III, Maurice Tandler.

Shades of F. Scott Fitzgerald roam Princeton as lads and lasses walk the well-clipped paths between venerable university halls, while russet leaves flutter overhead from rows of sturdy trees. Visions of knights and their fair maidens come to mind as explorers wander around Lambert Castle, an 1892 sandstone and granite mansion that looms like a medieval fortress with rounded towers and turrets on a hillside below the cliffs of the Garret Mountain Reservation. For art lovers who like to stroll on lush lawns and enjoy the beauty around them, Grounds for Sculpture is the place to be seen in New Jersey. And, then there's always the 127 miles of beach along the state's east coast that make perfect day trips for swimming, boating, fishing, and other fun activities.

Now in a revised and expanded 12th edition, New Jersey Day Trips offers everyone a fascinating journey through hundreds of tourist attractions in all corners of the Garden State. Plus, this comprehensive resource explores the most popular points just beyond the state's borders. Patrick Sarver has updated most entries and added more than twenty new points of interest to an already extensive list of destinations, making this the most sought-after guidebook about New Jersey. Attractions can be located easily by subject category, letting travelers zero in on places that appeal to them. Entries include descriptions, hours of operation, location, price range, telephone numbers, and Web sites, making this best seller a one-stop source of discovery for day trippers of all ages--an ideal travel guide for adults or families who live in or plan to visit New Jersey..

NJSAA Edited Works Award Winner (2023) 

Despite the many jokes and stereotypes about New Jersey and its residents, in reality the state is a wildly diverse place, home to a vast variety of landscapes, cultures, and people. There is no singular New Jersey experience, and the stories that its residents have to share about the state will surprise you.
 
New Jersey Fan Club: Artists and Writers Celebrate the Garden State is an eclectic anthology featuring personal essays, interviews, and comics from a broad group of established and emerging writers and artists who have something to say about New Jersey. It offers a multifaceted look at the state’s history and significance, told through narrative nonfiction, photographs, and illustrations.
 
New Jersey Fan Club is edited by Kerri Sullivan, founder of the popular Instagram account Jersey Collective (@jerseycollective), which features weekly takeovers by different New Jerseyans. This book functions the same way: it gives dozens of different contributors the chance to share what New Jersey looks like to them. The book is an exploration of how the same locale can shape people in different ways, and it will inspire readers to look at the Garden State with fresh eyes and appreciate its bounty of beautiful places and vibrant spaces.

New Jersey: A History of the Garden State presents a fresh, comprehensive overview of New Jersey’s history from the prehistoric era to the present. The findings of archaeologists, political, social, and economic historians provide a new look at how the Garden State has evolved.

The state has a rich Native American heritage and complex colonial history. It played a pivotal role in the American Revolution, early industrialization, and technological developments in transportation, including turnpikes, canals, and railroads. The nineteenth century saw major debates over slavery. While no Civil War battles were fought in New Jersey, most residents supported it while questioning the policies of the federal government.

Next, the contributors turn to industry, urbanization, and the growth of shore communities. A destination for immigrants, New Jersey continued to be one of the most diverse states in the nation. Many of these changes created a host of social problems that reformers tried to minimize during the Progressive Era. Settlement houses were established, educational institutions grew, and utopian communities were founded. Most notably, women gained the right to vote in 1920. In the decades leading up to World War II, New Jersey benefited from back-to-work projects, but the rise of the local Ku Klux Klan and the German American Bund were sad episodes during this period.

The story then moves to the rise of suburbs, the concomitant decline of the state’s cities, growing population density, and changing patterns of wealth. Deep-seated racial inequities led to urban unrest as well as political change, including such landmark legislation as the Mount Laurel decision. Today, immigration continues to shape the state, as does the tension between the needs of the suburbs, cities, and modest amounts of remaining farmland.

Well-known personalities, such as Jonathan Edwards, George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Dorothea Dix, Thomas Edison, Frank Hague, and Albert Einstein appear in the narrative. Contributors also mine new and existing sources to incorporate fully scholarship on women, minorities, and immigrants. All chapters are set in the context of the history of the United States as a whole, illustrating how New Jersey is often a bellwether for the nation..

The military history of New Jersey, from New Netherland’s struggles with the Lenape through colonial wars of empire to twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, is extensive and significant. New Jersey justly earned the title “Crossroads of the Revolution” in the War for Independence, and made a significant contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War. The state’s position along the Atlantic Coast brought war to the home front in 1812, 1918, and 1942. New Jersey was also the site of Bergen County’s Camp Merritt, which processed most of the American soldiers who went overseas in World War I, Fort Dix, a major training base, and Fort Monmouth, a center for military technology development in the twentieth century.
New Jersey: A Military History by military historian Joseph G. Bilby tells the long, diverse, and sometimes complicated story of New Jersey’s citizens and their significant and continuing role in America’s defense. Over more than 350 years as a colony and state, hundreds of thousands of New Jersey residents have served in regular armed forces, militia, and National Guard units or in direct support of those organizations. New Jerseyans in the military include General “Scotch Willie” Maxwell of Sussex County, an unappreciated Revolutionary War master tactician; First Sergeant George Ashby of Allentown, of Company H, 45th United States Colored Infantry, the state’s last surviving Civil War veteran; Clara Maas of Newark, a nurse who sacrificed her life in the effort to eradicate Yellow Fever; Captain William J. Reddan, who led his company into hell during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918; and Medal of Honor winner John Basilone, whose sense of duty and honor led him to return to combat and death in World War II.
Complete with maps, an annotated list of historical sites in the state, and further reading, New Jersey: A Military History is an important reference for those interested in the role of the Garden State in our nation’s wars. 
 

Most experts consider economic development to be the dominant factor influencing urban politics. They point to the importance of the finance and real estate industries, the need to improve the tax base, and the push to create jobs. Bruce F. Berg maintains that there are three forces which are equally important in explaining New York City politics: economic development; the city’s relationships with the state and federal governments, which influence taxation, revenue and public policy responsibilities; and New York City’s racial and ethnic diversity, resulting in demands for more equitable representation and greater equity in the delivery of public goods and services.

New York City Politics focuses on the impact of these three forces on the governance of New York City’s political system including the need to promote democratic accountability, service delivery equity, as well as the maintenance of civil harmony. This second edition updates the discussion with examples from the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations as well as current public policy issues including infrastructure, housing and homelessness, land use regulations, and education.  

The history of New York City’s urban development often centers on titanic municipal figures like Robert Moses and on prominent inner Manhattan sites like Central Park. New York Recentered boldly shifts the focus to the city’s geographic edges—the coastlines and waterways—and to the small-time unelected locals who quietly shaped the modern city. Kara Murphy Schlichting details how the vernacular planning done by small businessmen and real estate operators, performed independently of large scale governmental efforts, refigured marginal locales like Flushing Meadows and the shores of Long Island Sound and the East River in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The result is a synthesis of planning history, environmental history, and urban history that recasts the story of New York as we know it.

New York has long been both America’s leading cultural center and its sports capital, with far more championship teams, intracity World Series, and major prizefights than any other city. Pro football’s “Greatest Game Ever Played” took place in New York, along with what was arguably history’s most significant boxing match, the 1938 title bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. As the nation’s most crowded city, basketball proved to be an ideal sport, and for many years it was the site of the country’s most prestigious college basketball tournament. New York boasts storied stadiums, arenas, and gymnasiums and is the home of one of the world’s two leading marathons as well as the Belmont Stakes, the third event in horse racing’s Triple Crown.

New York sportswriters also wield national influence and have done much to connect sports to larger social and cultural issues, and the vitality and distinctiveness of New York’s street games, its ethnic institutions, and its sports-centered restaurants and drinking establishments all contribute to the city’s uniqueness.

New York Sports collects the work of fourteen leading sport historians, providing new insight into the social and cultural history of America’s major metropolis and of the United States. These writers address the topics of changing conceptions of manhood and violence, leisure and social class, urban night life and entertainment, women and athletics, ethnicity and assimilation, and more.

Raised in the squalor of a New York tenement until he was 10 years old, Nelson Díaz saw his life change when his family moved to a brand-new high-rise project in West Harlem in the 1950s. That experience, along with lessons learned as the only Latino law student at Temple University, would drive him throughout his life as a lawyer and activist, fighting for the expansion of rights for all Americans.

“No soy de aquí ni de allá” is a mantra for Puerto Ricans who feel like foreigners wherever they are and who seek a place for themselves. In his inspiring autobiography, Not from Here, Not from There, Díaz tells the story of his struggles and triumphs as his perspective widened from the New York streets and law school classrooms to the halls of power in Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Whether as a leader in economic development, a pioneer in court reform, or a champion of fair housing, Díaz has never stopped advocating for others. Díaz was happy to be the first Latino to “do something,” but he never wanted to be the last. This story of an outsider who worked his way to the inside offers powerful lessons on finding a place in the world by creating spaces where everyone is welcome.

Notorious New Jersey is the definitive guide to murder, mayhem, the mob, and corruption in the Garden State. With tabloid punch, Jon Blackwell tells riveting accounts of Alexander Hamilton falling mortally wounded on the dueling grounds of Weehawken; Dutch Schultz getting pumped full of lead in the men’s room of the Palace Chop House in Newark; and a gang of Islamic terrorists in Jersey City mixing the witch’s brew of explosives that became the first bomb to rock the World Trade Center. Along with these dramatic stories are tales of lesser-known oddities, such as the nineteenth-century murderer whose skin was turned into leather souvenirs, and the state senator from Jersey City who faked his death in a scuba accident in the 1970s in an effort to avoid prison.

Blackwell also sheds light on some historical whodunits—was Bruno Hauptmann really guilty of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby? Who was behind the anthrax attacks of 2001? Not forgotten either are notorious characters who may actually be innocent, including Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and those who have never been convicted of wrongdoing although they left office in scandal, including Robert Torricelli and James McGreevey.

Through 100 historic true-crime tales that span over 300 years of history, Blackwell shows readers a side of New Jersey that would make even the Sopranos shudder.