The historic Raritan Bay stretches from Staten Island to Sandy Hook, including the beach communities of Monmouth County. With its proximity to New York City and Jersey shore attractions, the bay region has been the setting for compelling moments throughout American history. The native Lenapes harvested oysters and fished the waters along the bayshore generations before Dutch and English colonists reached their coasts. Local slave Titus Cornelius, or Colonel Tye, escaped from bondage and led Loyalist forces in raids to destabilize the area during the Revolutionary War. Steamships traversed the bay carrying hordes of vacationers from New York to newly established resorts along the "Riviera of New Jersey" in the early twentieth century. Climb aboard as author John Schneider takes readers on a historical journey across Raritan Bay.
The Raritan Bayshore region of central New Jersey is an area that encompasses communities in Monmouth and Middlesex Counties on the northernmost part of the Jersey Shore--a place rich in history, nature, and recreation. The region has played a significant role throughout history, dating back to its earliest indigenous inhabitants and later European arrivals. Raritan Bayshore residents have been leaders in a number of fields, including politics, technology, architecture, the arts, and sports. Home to multiple national historic landmarks, the region has long been a summer tourism hot spot because of its abundance of beaches, vacation homes, amusements, and resorts. The region's people have encountered their fair share of trials and proven time after time that when faced with adversity, they respond by coming together as a community--the memorials and monuments in the area are a testament to this.
In July 1789 George Cadogan Morgan, born in Bridgend, Wales, and the nephew of the celebrated radical dissenter Richard Price (1723-91), found himself caught up in the opening events of the French Revolution and its consequences. In 1808, his family left Britain for America where his son, Richard Price Morgan, travelled extensively, made a descent of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers by raft and helped build some of the early American railroads. The adventures of both men are related here via letters George sent home to his family from France and through the autobiography written by his son in America.
Heartbeats in the Muck traces the incredible arc of New York Harbor’s environmental history. Once a pristine estuary bristling with oysters and striped bass and visited by sharks, porpoises, and seals, the harbor has been marked by centuries of rampant industrialization and degradation of its natural environment. Garbage dumping, oil spills, sewage sludge, pesticides, heavy metals, poisonous PCBs, landfills, and dredging greatly diminished life in the harbor, in some places to nil. Now, forty years after the Clean Water Act began to resurrect New York Harbor, John Waldman delivers a new edition of his New York Society Library Award–winning book. Heartbeats in the Muck is a lively, accessible narrative of the animals, water quality, and habitats of the harbor. It includes captivating personal accounts of the author’s explorations of its farthest and most noteworthy reaches, treating readers to an intimate environmental tour of a shad camp near the George Washington Bridge, the Arthur Kill (home of the resurgent heron colonies), the Hackensack Meadowlands, the darkness under a giant Manhattan pier, and the famously polluted Gowanus Canal. A new epilogue details some of the remarkable changes that have come upon New York Harbor in recent years. Waldman’s prognosis is a good one: Ultimately, environmental awareness and action has allowed the harbor to begin cleaning itself. Although it will never regain its native biological glory, the return of oysters, herons, and a host of other creatures is an indication of New York Harbor’s rebirth. This excellent, engaging introduction to the ecological issues surrounding New York Harbor will appeal to students and general readers alike. Heartbeats in the Muck is a must-read for anyone who likes probing the wilds, whether country or city, and natural history books such as Beautiful Swimmers and Mannahatta.
Nearly 250 years after ninety-five-year-old Elder Thomas Faunce got caught up in the mythmaking around Plymouth Rock, his great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter Hilda Faunce Wetherill died in Pacific Grove, California, leaving behind a cache of letters and family papers. The remarkable story they told prompted historian Lynne Marie Getz to search out related collections and archives—and from these to assemble a family chronology documenting three generations of American life. Abolitionists, Doctors, Ranchers, and Writers tells of zealous abolitionists and free-state campaigners aiding and abetting John Brown in Bleeding Kansas; of a Civil War soldier serving as a provost marshal in an occupied Arkansas town; of young women who became doctors in rural Texas and New York City in the late nineteenth century; of a homesteader and businessman among settler colonists in Colorado; and of sisters who married into the Wetherill family—known for their discovery of Ancient Pueblo sites at Mesa Verde and elsewhere—who catered to a taste for Western myths with a trading post on a Navajo reservation and a guest ranch for tourists on the upper Rio Grande. Whether they tell of dabbling in antebellum reforms like spiritualism, vegetarianism, and water cures; building schools for free blacks in Ohio or championing Indian rights in the West; serving in the US Army or confronting the struggles of early women doctors and educators, these letters reveal the sweep of American history on an intimate scale, as it was lived and felt and described by individuals; their family story reflects the richness and complexity of the genealogy of the nation.
History of the United States is a book by John Clark Ridpath. The author was an American educator, historian, and editor; who here presents a schoolbook of American history up to 1904.
