"Maxine Lurie and Richard Veit do more than just connect the chronological dots of our sprawling history from the first Lenape inhabitants 12,000 years ago to today’s hectic lifestyles. They’ve culled the talents of 11 scholars and combined their insights and expertise into a resource intended for both students and a general audience. The editors introduce and contextualize a yeasty mix of characters-loyalists, revolutionaries, Federalists, Republicans (soon to be Democrats), Whigs, abolitionists, plutocrats, inventors, reformers, bosses (think Frank Hague) - into nicely organized chapters ranging from the pre-colonial up to suburbanization and cities in distress. This being New Jersey, though, the volume is not without inflections of whimsy."(Star-Ledger) "These essays tell us about what was unique, significant, and not always well-known about New Jersey’s colorful, diverse past, and they relate its history to the contours of American history more generally."- Paul G. E. Clemens (author of Rutgers since 1945: A History of the State University of New Jersey) "There's so much history in this state, it's hard to pack it into one book. But that's just what Maxine N. Lurie and Richard Veit attempted in New Jersey: A History of the Garden State, the first overview of the state in 35 years."(Asbury Park Press) "These ten essays, strung on a historical time line from precolonial times to the present, give most of the contributing historians a chance to highlight their particular geographic and period expertise, with hints of a relationship with large, persistent themes like industrial innovation, political corruption, or racial or gender inequality. Recommended." (Choice)