Envisioning New Jersey

An Illustrated History of the Garden State

By Maxine N. Lurie and Richard F. Veit

SERIES: Rivergate Regionals Collection

Rutgers University Press

Winner of the 2018 Award of Merit and the 2018 Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History
Winner of the 2017 New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Author Award

See New Jersey history as you read about it! Envisioning New Jersey brings together 650 spectacular images that illuminate the course of the state’s history, from prehistoric times to the present. Readers may think they know New Jersey’s history—the state’s increasing diversity, industrialization, and suburbanization—but the visual record presented here dramatically deepens and enriches that knowledge.

Maxine N. Lurie and Richard F. Veit, two leading authorities on New Jersey history, present a smorgasbord of informative pictures, ranging from paintings and photographs to documents and maps. Portraits of George Washington and Molly Pitcher from the Revolution, battle flags from the War of 1812 and the Civil War, women air raid wardens patrolling the streets of Newark during World War II, the Vietnam War Memorial—all show New Jerseyans fighting for liberty. There are also pictures of Thomas Mundy Peterson, the first African American to vote after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment; Paul Robeson marching for civil rights; university students protesting in the 1960s; and Martin Luther King speaking at Monmouth University. The authors highlight the ethnic and religious variety of New Jersey inhabitants with images that range from Native American arrowheads and fishing implements, to Dutch and German buildings, early African American churches and leaders, and modern Catholic and Hindu houses of worship. Here, too, are the great New Jersey innovators from Thomas Edison to the Bell Labs scientists who worked on transistors.

Compiled by the authors of New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, this volume is intended as an illustrated companion to that earlier volume. Envisioning New Jersey also stands on its own because essays synthesizing each era accompany the illustrations. A fascinating gold mine of images from the state’s past, Envisioning New Jersey is the first illustrated book on the Garden State that covers its complete history, capturing the amazing transformation of New Jersey over time.

View sample pages (http://issuu.com/rutgersuniversitypress/docs/lurie_veit_envisioning_sample)

Thanks to the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and generous individual donors for making this project possible.

This volume provides a wonderful introduction to the history of the Garden State by combining a concise and readable narrative with hundreds of significant written, visual, and material documents.'

Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers

Winner of the 2017 New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Author Award, Reference Category New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Author Award

'Envisioning N.J.': Historians use 650+ images to tell state's history

Take a sneak peek at a selection of images from the book and read an interview with co-author Maxine Lurie
[http://bit.do/envisioning] The Star-Ledger

In New Book, Every Picture Tells A (Jersey) Story

Read an interview with co-author Maxine Lurie
[http://bit.do/njmonthly] New Jersey Monthly

The 18 books every New Jersey resident should read before they die

Featuring, Envisioning New Jersey
[http://bit.do/18books] NJ.com

A gorgeous coffee table book for students and researchers of New Jersey history [that] proves itself to be especially useful for instructors at all levels.’ New Jersey Studies

History Professor Receives Book Award at National Conference,' by Joseph Murante Seton Hall University

MAXINE N. LURIE is professor emerita of history at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, and chairs the New Jersey Historical Commission. She previously collaborated with Richard Veit on New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, and she is the coeditor of The Encyclopedia of New Jersey and Mapping New Jersey, as well as the editor of two editions of A New Jersey Anthology (all by Rutgers University Press).

RICHARD F. VEIT is a professor of anthropology and chair of the department of history and anthropology at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He is the author of Digging New Jersey’s Past and coauthor of New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones: History in the Landscape, as well as coeditor of New Jersey: A History of the Garden State (with Lurie, all by Rutgers University Press).

Preface

1 Beginnings: Archaeology and Indians, the Long Journey

2 The Colonial Period: Early New Jersey

3 The American Revolution and Confederation Period

4 New Jersey in the Early Republic

5 The Jacksonian Era, 1820–1850

6 Civil War and Reconstruction

7 Industrialization, Immigration, and Urbanization: The Post–Civil War Years

8 Immigration, the Progressive Era, and World War I

9 The Great Depression and World War II

10 Postwar New Jersey

Acknowledgments