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.

On the Turtle’s Back is the first collection of folklore from the Lenape people, New Jersey’s native inhabitants. Originally compiled by anthropologist M. R. Harrington over a century ago, but never published until now, it shares the tribe’s cherished tales about the world’s creation, epic heroes, and ordinary human foibles.

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.

New Jersey is sometimes imagined, particularly by non-New Jerseyans, as a giant garbage dump for New York and Philadelphia. But every place has had to struggle with the challenges of waste management. New Jersey's trash history is in fact more interesting and more important than most. New Jersey’s waste history includes intensive planning, deep-seated political conflict, organized crime, and literally every level of state and federal judiciary. It is a colorful history, to say the least, and one that includes a number of firsts with regard to recycling, comprehensive planning, and the challenging economics of trash.

The American Revolution in New Jersey lasted eight long years, during which many were caught in the middle of a vicious civil war. 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.

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). In the 1670s, Quaker men and women sought to acquire all Lenape territory for their own use and to sell as real estate to new immigrants. Through epidemics that ravaged Lenape communities and the introduction of slavery to the colony, Quakers defied their prior experience of religious persecution and their principles of peaceful resolution of conflict and equality of everyone before God. 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.