The Razing of Tinton Falls: Voices from the American Revolution


Book Description

On June 10, 1779, a Loyalist raiding party landed on the shore of Monmouth County, New Jersey, and advanced unnoticed on the town of Tinton Falls. It captured five leading Patriots and plundered many others. Homes and barns were burned to the ground; stores were looted and livestock driven off. The local militia scattered. That afternoon, as the raiders loaded their barges, a reinforced militia engaged the Loyalists in a battle that climaxed with vicious hand-to-hand combat. Historian Michael Adelberg brings the Tinton Falls raid to life, re-creating the day in the voices of ten narrators based on real people--a child of a Revolutionary leader, a Loyalist officer, a militiaman, a pacifist, a businesswoman and many others--each of whom experienced the day very differently.




Reporting the Revolution


Book Description

"This is 'you are there' history at its best...[Reporting the Revolutionary War] lets us see and feel how events unfolded for the people who lived them."—American History For the colonists of the new world, the years of the American Revolution were a time of upheaval and rebellion. History boils it down to a few key events and has embodied it with a handful of legendary personalities. But the reality of the time was that everyday people witnessed thousands of little moments blaze into an epic conflict-for more than twenty years. Now, for the first time, experience the sparks of revolution the way the colonists did—in their very own town newspapers and broadsheets. Reporting the Revolutionary War is a stunning collection of primary sources, sprinkled with modern analysis from 37 historians. Featuring Patriot and Loyalist eyewitness accounts from newspapers printed on both sides of the Atlantic, readers will experience the revolution as it happened with the same immediacy and uncertainty of the colonists. The American newspapers of the eighteenth century fanned the flames of rebellion, igniting the ideas of patriotism and liberty among average citizens who had never before been so strongly united. Within the papers, you'll also read the private correspondence and battlefield letters of the rebels and patriots who grabbed the attention of each and every colonist and pushed them to fight for freedom and change. From one of America's leading Revolutionary War newspaper archivists, Todd Andrlik, and guided by scores of historians and experts, Reporting the Revolutionary War brings you into the homes of Americans and lets you see through their eyes the tinderbox of war as it explodes. "The story of the battle for independence unlike any version that has been told." —Military Review




Words that Make New Jersey History


Book Description

Words That Make New Jersey History is a book-length collection of documents that spans the history of New Jersey, from the arrival of Dutch traders in the 1600s to the present. The materials touch on a range of subjects such as factories and farms, cities and suburbs, slavery and abolitionism, the temperance and woman suffrage campaigns, race and ethnic relations, the labor movement, and economic and environmental issues. The documents include letters, journals, pamphlets, petitions, artwork, and songs created not only by those who exercised power, but also by men and women of more humble station--immigrants, workers, slaves, foreign travelers, and civil servants. Their lively accounts range from descriptions of Native Americans in the seventeenth century to Bruce Springsteen's recent lament about a declining factory town. New to this expanded edition is the text of James McGreevey's "I am a Gay American" speech, as well as entries about the Abbott v. Burke court ruling mandating that New Jersey equalize funding of urban and suburban schools districts, sprawl and its effects on water supply, and the state's economic boom in the 1990s. A balanced survey of New Jersey's history presented in the context of a changing nation, this volume is well suited to general readers who want to explore the primary sources of the state's past, and to U.S. history students at the high school and college levels.




Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North


Book Description

Focusing on the development of a single African American community in eastern New Jersey, Hodges examines the experience of slavery and freedom in the rural north. This unique social history addresses many long held assumptions about the experience of slavery and emancipation outside the south. For example, by tracing the process by which whites maintained "a durable architecture of oppression" and a rigid racial hierarchy, it challenges the notions that slavery was milder and that racial boundaries were more permeable in the north. Monmouth County, New Jersey, because of its rich African American heritage and equally well-preserved historical record, provides an outstanding opportunity to study the rural life of an entire community over the course of two centuries. Hodges weaves an intricate pattern of life and death, work and worship, from the earliest settlement to the end of the Civil War.




These Things Happen


Book Description

A domestic story told in numerous original and endearing voices. The story opens with Wesley, a tenth grader, and involves his two sets of parents (the mom and her second husband, a very thoughtful doctor; and the father who has become a major gay lawyer/activist and his fabulous "significant other" who owns a restaurant). Wesley is a fabulous kid, whose equally fabulous best friend Theo has just won a big school election and simultaneously surprises everyone in his life by announcing that he is gay. No one is more surprised than Wesley, who actually lives temporarily with his gay father and partner, so that he can get to know his rather elusive dad. When a dramatic and unexpected trauma befalls the boys in school, all the parents converge noisily in love and well-meaning support. But through it all, each character ultimately is made to face certain challenges and assumptions within his/her own life, and the playing out of their respective life priorities and decisions is what makes this novel so endearing and so special.




Iconoclasm in New York


Book Description

King George III will not stay on the ground. Ever since a crowd in New York City toppled his equestrian statue in 1776, burying some of the parts and melting the rest into bullets, the king has been riding back into American culture, raising his gilded head in visual representations and reappearing as fragments. In this book, Wendy Bellion asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George III-and why they keep bringing it back. Locating the statue's destruction in a transatlantic space of radical protest and material violence-and tracing its resurrection through pictures and performances-Bellion advances a history of American art that looks beyond familiar narratives of paintings and polite spectators to encompass a riotous cast of public sculptures and liberty poles, impassioned crowds and street protests, performative smashings and yearning re-creations. Bellion argues that iconoclasm mobilized a central paradox of the national imaginary: it was at once a destructive phenomenon through which Americans enacted their independence and a creative phenomenon through which they continued to enact British cultural identities. Persuasive and engaging, Iconoclasm in New York demonstrates how British monuments gave rise to an American creation story. This fascinating cultural history will captivate art historians, specialists in iconoclasm, and general readers interested in American history and New York City.







Saving the Hooker


Book Description

Matthew Hristahalois is a not-so-scholarly scholar. He's obsessed with the "Hooker with a Heart of Gold" character that keeps turning up in movies like Pretty Woman and The Hangover -- the beautiful and kind fallen woman who can only be saved by Prince Charming. Matthew wins a post-doc to see if real fallen women can be saved by a good man. He casts himself as Prince Charming and sets out to study and rehabilitate real New York City prostitutes, at least until he meets a fiery auburn-haired prostitute who calls herself Julia Roberts. Saving the Hooker is a fast-paced assault on male hubris and the recycled fairy tales at the core of so many of our favorite books and movies. It is also a bawdy tour of lower Manhattan's escort service prostitution scene, a poke in the eye of academic orthodoxy and a not-so-subtle send up of cable television talk-news. Centered on the combustible relationship between Matthew and Julia, Saving the Hooker makes comic hash out of modern America's show horse institutions and sacred cow issues: academia, high and low media, political correctness, misogyny and sexual assault.




Patriots, Loyalists, and Revolution in New York City, 1775-1776


Book Description

A Norton original in the Reacting to the Past series, Patriots, Loyalists, and Revolution in New York City invites students to experience the chaos of the American Revolution.




Washington's Crossing


Book Description

Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, George Washington--and many other Americans--refused to let the Revolution die. On Christmas night, as a howling nor'easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his men across the river and attacked the exhausted Hessian garrison at Trenton, killing or capturing nearly a thousand men. A second battle of Trenton followed within days. The Americans held off a counterattack by Lord Cornwallis's best troops, then were almost trapped by the British force. Under cover of night, Washington's men stole behind the enemy and struck them again, defeating a brigade at Princeton. The British were badly shaken. In twelve weeks of winter fighting, their army suffered severe damage, their hold on New Jersey was broken, and their strategy was ruined. Fischer's richly textured narrative reveals the crucial role of contingency in these events. We see how the campaign unfolded in a sequence of difficult choices by many actors, from generals to civilians, on both sides. While British and German forces remained rigid and hierarchical, Americans evolved an open and flexible system that was fundamental to their success. The startling success of Washington and his compatriots not only saved the faltering American Revolution, but helped to give it new meaning.




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