New Jersey Online: Affective Histories in Newark’s Digital Archives

This article examines how Newark’s affective histories and narratives of racial violence are being reproduced in the city’s digital archives. This article examines two digital archives, Old Newark and the Newark Public Library’s My Newark Story, to explore how emotion is used by individuals and institutions to narrate Newark’s 1967 riots and the city’s subsequent waves of white flight, immigration, and systemic neglect. The article argues that while Old Newark serves as a space for former white Newarkers to express feelings of nostalgia, loss, and displacement that often cast themselves as the victims of diaspora and marginalization, My Newark Story functions as a corrective project that resists the centering of whiteness and feelings of victimization that have haunted Newark’s history.

Jesus and the Bulldozer: Religion, Suburbanization, and Urban Renewal in a New Jersey Camp Meeting Community

The history of suburbanization in New Jersey is a well-established topic in the scholarly literature. Since the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the state’s northeastern and southwestern areas have become dense with suburban communities tied, culturally and economically, to New York City or Philadelphia. By the early twentieth century, these areas were a mix of middle-class white enclaves, Black towns, immigrant and working-class communities, agricultural hamlets, and industrial suburbs. However, in the late nineteenth century, some suburbs emerged as religious retreats. This article explores how suburbanization and, by the 1960s, urban renewal, transformed the Gloucester County borough of Pitman’s landscape. Founded in 1871 as a Methodist camp meeting resort, the history of Pitman demonstrates ways that religion complemented suburbanization, and suburbanization, amid religious decline and secularization, reshaped the religious landscape of one South Jersey community.

The Archaeology of Morris Cohen: A Jewish Farmer’s Victory over a Groundhog in Nineteenth-Century Green Brook, New Jersey

Excavations at the Vermeule-Mundy House uncovered a rich artifact deposit dating to the mid-1860s. The artifacts can be associated with Morris Cohen, an early Jewish farmer to settle in rural New Jersey, where he raised a family, a range of animals, and grains, and produced a large amount of butter. In an effort to deter a groundhog from burrowing under their porch, the Cohens placed hundreds of ceramic, glass, and iron objects into the burrow. These artifacts provide information about their table settings and agricultural production, and they may provide details about Cohen’s socioeconomic status as well as his Jewish ethnicity through the use of multiple ceramic and glass sets as well as a preference for olive oil.

Portrait of Place: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints of New Jersey, 1761–1898

Portrait of Place: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints of New Jersey, 1761–1898, reviewed by Kelly Morgan

Teaching the Pandemic in the Social Studies Classroom

In this editorial, Professor William Gorman (an educator with 30 years’ experience) explores the delicate but important matter of teaching the pandemic even as we are still dealing with its consequences, and provides a brief list of resources that might prove a useful starting point for educators.

William S. Bucklin and George P. Bartle: Accomplished Artists of Phalanx, New Jersey

This narrative describes the lives and artistic careers of William Savery Bucklin (1851–1928) and George Parker Bartle (1853–1918), both of Phalanx, a hamlet in Colts Neck, Monmouth County, New Jersey. Three of the works illustrated come from the art collection of the Monmouth County Park System. They acquired them because the paintings depict woodland scenes on the opposite side of the Swimming River Reservoir from their Thompson Park campus, the back areas of which still retain this wooded character.

Photographers of the Civil War Era: Frank H. Price of Elizabeth and Newark

This article is another about the generation of New Jersey photographers who began their career during the U.S. Civil War, initiated with the consideration of Theodore Gubelman in the Winter 2020 issue of New Jersey Studies. Please see that issue for a general introduction. This essay is a case study about Frank H. Price, who also served in the Union Army, and although, like Gubelman, Price had a successful business over a number of years, he had different personal and professional experiences that broaden our understanding of life in the Garden State in the second half of the nineteenth century. Experiencing many of the same events as his portrait subjects, Price is an exemplar of the ambitious young men who personified what Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized in 1844 as “the Young American,” who engaged in the marketplace of ideas and commerce in “a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, and expectations.” Although Price did not live to old age, he made his mark among his contemporaries. His story includes typical and exceptional experiences, triumphs and tragedies. Note: You can find additional Frank Price photos here: https://web.ingage.io/Pfs9hng.

Photographers of the Civil War Era: Theodore Gubelman of Jersey City

The Civil War greatly increased what later became known as “picture hunger.” To meet the demand, 235 new photo galleries started in New Jersey between 1861 and 1865, among them that of the ambitious German immigrant Theodore Gubelman of Jersey City. Although many of the Civil War era photographers did not make the medium their long-term career, Gubelman took advantage of changing trends and technology to remain in business into the next century.

The President and the Plague

Our “Research Notes” section was inaugurated to allow scholars to share their works in progress and solicit feedback from others in the NJ History community. All are welcome to contribute- simply send submissions for inclusion in future issues to the editor ([email protected]). Beginning with our Winter 2021 issue, we are listing each note individually rather than in one document. In this note, Michael P. Riccards explores how Woodrow Wilson faced similar problems in 1918-1919 with that pandemic, and his response was very different from Donald Trump.