New Jersey's Natures - (Ceres: Rutgers Studies in History) by Raechel Lutz (Paperback)

About the Book

New Jersey's Natures investigates how nature and history are intertwined within this small but mighty state. Authors in the volume cover topics from the colonial period to the present across North, South, and Central Jersey, and investigate the lived histories of the Delaware River and Bay, the Pinelands, and the unforgettable Jersey Shore.

Book Synopsis

New Jersey's Natures takes up the challenge of expanding academic and popular conceptions of New Jersey and its landscapes through the lens of environmental history. Scholars' essays showcase the ways in which nature is integral to understandings of the state and its past as well as its future. These essays show that New Jersey should no longer solely be known as a place where pollution and suburbanization run amok but rather a place where history happens.

The contributors investigate how nature and history are intertwined within this small but mighty state, covering topics from the colonial period to the present across North, South, and Central Jersey. They investigate natural features like the Delaware River and Bay, the Pinelands, and the unforgettable Jersey Shore. In this book, you will find Indigenous Americans making meaning as settlers threaten their ways of life, Governor William Livingston considering Central Jersey's features as he fights in the American Revolution, farmers building the state's industrial agriculture, a foreign diplomat planting an arboretum, squatters in the swampy Meadowlands subverting social and economic norms, activists fighting for parks, forests, and beaches across two centuries, and much more.

Review Quotes

"New Jersey's Natures is an exciting and interesting collection. It represents a good mix of authors and historical sub-fields, including essays that engage public history and environmental justice work."

--Elaine Lafay "Rutgers University"

"The essays in New Jersey's Natures are eye-opening and engagingly written; taken together, they feel very timely. Lutz has gathered a committed set of environmental historians working at the leading edge of the field, and this book should be of interest to environmental historians as a whole, not just scholars of New Jersey."

--Jack Bouchard "author of Terra Nova: Food, Water, and Work in an Early Atlantic World"

About the Author

RAECHEL LUTZ is an environmental historian and high school social studies teacher based in Northern New Jersey. Her academic work investigates the intersections of environmental history, the history of technology, energy history, and visual culture. She is a coeditor of American Energy Cinema. Her 2018 Rutgers University history PhD dissertation, "Crude Conservation: Nature, Pollution, and Technology at Standard Oil's New Jersey Refineries, 1870-1980s" was awarded The Governor Alfred E. Driscoll Dissertation Prize by the New Jersey Historical Commission.