In 1867 Kusakabe Taro, a young samurai from Fukui, Japan, began studying at Rutgers as its first foreign student. Three years later, in 1870, his former tutor, friend, and Rutgers graduate, William Elliot Griffis, left for Japan to teach English and science. Griffis and Kusakabe were a small piece of a vast transnational network of leading modernizers of Japan in the 1860s and 70s. Through contributions from scholars and archivists in the U.S., Canada, and Japan, Rutgers Meets Japan aims to reconstruct these early Rutgers-Japan connections.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is one of the most important figures in the history of American labor. This stirring biography traces her personal and political life, foregrounding her commitment to civil liberties as the enduring force behind her worldview and returns her to her rightful place at the heart of the working-class movement.
 

Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark looks at Newark, New Jersey’s once proposed Krueger-Scott African-American Cultural Center and the oral history collection generated to be a part of the Center. The narrators in this oral history collection recount their lives in Newark, painting pictures of everyday urbanity while also providing insight into 20th century Black urban life more generally.

The Georgia of the North is a compelling narrative about the little-known struggles that African American women, and their community, faced when they arrived in the Garden State by way of the Great Migration to 1954 as they laid the foundations of the American civil rights movement in the North in the process.

Combining literary analysis with historical research, Thomas Gustafson examines how Philip Roth’s acclaimed 1997 novel American Pastoral draws upon the history of Brookside, New Jersey as its model for the fictional hamlet of Old Rimrock. American Anti-Pastoral peels back myths about the bucolic Garden State countryside to reveal deep fissures within the heart of American democracy.

Historian James Carter takes a close look at how the rock music of the 1960s played an integral role in the lives of American college students. He traces connections between rock fandom and the civil rights protests, free speech activism, radical ideas, lifestyle transformations, and anti-war movements that revolutionized universities.