Envisioning New Jersey

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.