Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
New Jersey
In the teeth of near defeat, General George Washington pulled out miraculous mid-winter victories.
A hundred boardwalks, gone but not quite dead, await a new dawn
A New Jersey seaside resort struggles to save the architecture and the memories of the Eisenhower years.
Thomas Edison's gift to the Christmas season
Hoboken’s history of hard work has an undeniablly gritty charm, and its view of Manhattan is incomparable.
On September 26, 1918, the Meuse-Argonne offensive began. The attack on the German lines in France lasted for 47 days, until the war’s end, and remains the longest battle in American history. During the assault, Gen. John J.
Consigned to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Garbage Run,” they fought their own war on the home front, and they helped shape a victory as surely as their brothers and husbands did overseas.
All the new lady brakemen on the Pennsylvania Railroad were put to work on what was officially known as the Jersey Coast Extra List.
America looked good to a high school senior then, and that year looks wonderfully safe to us now, but it was a time of tumult, and there were plenty of shadows, along with the sunshine.
It was a very good year. Certainly it was if you were 17. I was a senior in high school in 1954, a member of the class of January 1955, at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, New Jersey.
You can rise fast and far in America, but, sometimes, the cost of the journey is hard to tally.
For a long time, I have wanted to write about a vision of my father I experienced on a New York City subway train while riding downtown to a literary meeting. As a historian, I am skeptical of visions. I pride myself on my rationality, I rely on facts.
The Secret Service considered Emanuel Ninger a common counterfeiter. He saw himself as an American master of the impressionist school.
THE MOST PRESUMPTUOUS counterfeiter in American history was a blue-eyed, sandy-bearded, German sign painter named Emanuel Ninger. As a sign painter he was adequate; as an impressionist, a historic master. And a soaring egotist.
When the Norwegian artist Lauritz Larsen Mossige emigrated to America in the early 1880’s, he settled in Deckertown—now Sussex—New Jersey, and changed his name to Louis Larsen.
Besides being a bigot, a fop, and a thief, the British governor Lord Cornbury, had some peculiar fetishes
Despite their many differences, Queen Anne’s North American colonies all shared a decent respect for propriety—or at least the appearance thereof.
Under duress in a British prison, Richard Stockton of New Jersey had the singular misfortune to become
Various legends linger around the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the circumstances of the signing.
She was eighteen—pretty and sensitive, to judge by her photograph, taken in 1863. For many another girl, that age would have represented a new chapter in life in the form of a husband, children, a home of her own.
Fourth in a series of paintings for AMERICAN HERITAGE
American spirits were at a low ebb as the year 1776 drew to a close.
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