New Jersey

Name: Chicken Bone Beach
Brand: Ronald J. Stephens
SKU: 9781467109574
Price: 17.99 USD
Availability: InStock

Hop aboard the Blue Comet for a ride to Atlantic City or croon along with a Hainesport ghost. New Jersey history can keep you up late, so stop by an all-night diner. The moonlight only adds charm to the Victorian architecture of Cape May, while Richard Biegenwald’s murderous legacy casts a shadow over the Jersey Shore. From William Carlos Williams setting pen to paper in Rutherford to the joy of a Clementon lake in summer, these New Jersey history books make time for the Garden State. [View all New Jersey books]

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Chicken Bone Beach

Paperback

$23.99 $17.99 Save 25%

The Franklin Park Tragedy

Paperback

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

New Jersey's Revolutionary Rivalry

Paperback

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

Hidden History of Newark, New Jersey

Paperback

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

Parallel Communities

Paperback

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

Abolition and the Underground Railroad in South Jersey

Paperback

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

Chicken Bone Beach

9781467109574

$23.99 $17.99 Save 25%

During the Jim Crow era, a group of Atlantic City hotel owners and politicians agreed to designate Missouri Avenue Beach, later nicknamed Chicken Bone Beach, as sandy space where thousands of African American vacationers could enjoy the pleasures of family, friends, and summer fun annually. From the early 1900s to the mid-1960s, this space along the shoreline was occupied by local families and African American vacationers. Back then, Atlantic City was considered “America’s premiere resort.” But off the Boardwalk between Mississippi and Missouri Avenues was where Blacks shared fond memories. The Northside, where local Black families lived, was where everyone from the East Coast and Midwest came to experience rhythm and blues and jazz at Club Harlem. Nearly every major Black artist and musician toured the Kentucky Avenue scene, and some even sunbathed on the beach. While the city remains an American cultural landscape, Chicken Bone Beach is a nearly forgotten landmark in the annals of outdoor leisure and recreation history.

The Franklin Park Tragedy

9781467143585

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

Author Brian Armstrong tells the shocking story of this “sundown town” and how it evolved into the diverse community that exists today.

On March 1, 1894, two African American men broke into a home in rural Franklin Park and murdered a white woman and her daughter before her husband fought and killed the attackers. The newspapers called it the “Franklin Park Tragedy,” and the story captivated public attention nationally and abroad. Another tragedy came afterward, with the racist forced expulsion of many local African American residents.

New Jersey's Revolutionary Rivalry

9781467157506

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

A Tale of Two Foes

After the Battle of Monmouth Court House, in June 1778, the Revolutionary War in Monmouth County devolved into skirmishes between local militias and British Loyalists. Chief among these warring factions were revered rebel hero Captain Joshua Huddy and his fierce rival, a runaway enslaved Black man called Colonel Tye, who fought for the British. Attempting to bring the captured Huddy to prison, Tye was killed in battle, and when Loyalists murdered Huddy without benefit of trial two years later, the resulting international outrage jeopardized Benjamin Franklin’s Paris peace treaty negotiations. Only when Marie Antoinette pleaded with George Washington to stop the retaliatory hanging of a young British lieutenant did the peace talks resume.

Author Rick Geffken reveals the stories of these two obscure enemies who died and rose to fame for their beliefs in independence.

Hidden History of Newark, New Jersey

9781467152617

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

Brick City Past Revealed/

Newark's history is as diverse and powerful as the community that continues to call New Jersey's largest city home. The colonial settlement at Four Corners—the Broad and Market intersection—grew into one of the most heavily traveled thoroughfares in the nation. In the nineteenth century, innovations such as the public use of the electric light bulb in Military Park and the discovery of how to make patent leather established Newark as a flourishing industrial hub. Dramatic events including the battle between Nazi sympathizers and city residents in the 1930s, hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s and the event that triggered the infamous 1967 riots, defined a raucous twentieth century in Newark. Today, urban farming can be found in the Ironbound, NBA star Shaquille O’Neal has helped fund the city's first high-rise tower in fifty years and revitalization efforts continue. Author Helen Lippman presents hidden history of Newark, New Jersey.

Parallel Communities

9781596295421

$21.99 $16.49 Save 25%

For slaves escaping on the Underground Railroad, names like Springtown and Snow Hill promised sanctuary and salvation. Under the pressures of racial prejudice, free blacks, runaway slaves and even many Native Americans formed island communities on the periphery of South Jersey towns. While Lawnside and others continue to thrive today, fringe communities� like Marshalltown and Timbuctoo now exist only in memory. In this discussion of these primarily African American communities, Dennis Rizzo validates their role in the preservation of tradition, definition of extended family and creation of a social bond between diverse peoples; together they formed parallel communities based on, but independent of, the larger towns and villages familiar to us all.

Abolition and the Underground Railroad in South Jersey

9781467155199

$24.99 $18.74 Save 25%

Southern New Jersey was a hotbed of slave fugitives, freedmen and abolitionists in the Civil War era.

The proud 22nd Regiment of the United States Colored Troops included hundreds of Black New Jerseyans ready to fight for emancipation and the Union cause. Abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, Abigail Goodwin and Benjamin Sheppard operated among key landmarks of the Underground Railroad in South Jersey counties such as Cape May, Cumberland and Salem. Slavery and the rights of Black Americans were at the forefront of the region's attention including stories such as a melee in a Cape May hotel between Black waiters and white patrons, the covert signaling of boats ferrying fugitive slaves across the Delaware River and the daring rescue of a runway slave from the hands of slave catchers by local church worshipers. Author Ellen Alford reveals the history of abolition and the Underground Railroad in South Jersey.