This illustrated guidebook to New Jersey's old burial grounds is unique, not just for New Jersey, but for anywhere in America. Janice Kohl Sarapin introduces you to the history and lore of old graveyards. She shows you how to read epitaphs, how to date gravestones by style, how to restore an abandoned graveyard, and how to find out the stories of the people buried there. She describes more than 120 fascinating old burial grounds throughout the state (including the cemeteries of African-Americans, Jewish communities, and other ethnic and religious groups). She provides full directions and details about what makes each one special as well as suggestions for planning your visit and for educational activities to use with children and adults.

The Lenape tribe, also known as the Delaware Nation, lived for centuries on the land that English colonists later called New Jersey. But once America gained its independence, they were forced to move further west: to Indiana, then Missouri, and finally to the territory that became Oklahoma. These reluctant migrants were not able to carry much from their ancestral homeland, but they managed to preserve the myths and fables that had been passed down for generations. 
 
On the Turtle’s Back is the first collection of Lenape folklore, originally compiled by anthropologist M. R.  Harrington over a century ago, but never published until now. In it, the Delaware share their cherished tales about the world’s creation, epic heroes, and ordinary human foibles. It features stories told to Harrington by two Lenape couples, Julius and Minnie Fouts and Charles and Susan Elkhair, who sought to officially record their legends before their language and cultural traditions died out. More recent interviews with Lenape elders are also included, as their reflections on hearing these stories as children speak to the status of the tribe and its culture today. Together, they welcome you into their rich and wonderous imaginative world. 

 

Though New York’s Lower East Side today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and ’80s Manhattan.
 
Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America.

Albert M. Greenfield (1887-1967), an ambitious immigrant outsider, was courted for his business acumen by mayors, senators, governors, and presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. As this feisty Russian Jew built a business empire that encompassed real estate, stores (including Bonwit Teller and Tiffany's), hotels (including the Ben Franklin and the Bellevue-Stratford), banks, newspapers, transportation companies, and even the Loft Candy Corporation, he challenged the entrenched business elite. Greenfield was also instrumental in bringing both major political conventions to Philadelphia in 1948.
 
In The Outsider, veteran journalist and best-selling author Dan Rottenberg deftly chronicles the astonishing rises, falls, and countless reinventions of this savvy businessman. Greenfield's power allowed him to cross social, religious, and ethnic boundaries with impunity. He alarmed Philadelphia's conservative business and social leaders-Christians and Jews alike-some of whom plotted his downfall.
 
In this engaging account of Greenfield's fascinating life, Rottenberg demonstrates the extent to which one uniquely brilliant and energetic man pushed the boundaries of society's limitations on individual potential. The Outsider provides a microcosmic look at three twentieth-century upheavals: the rise of Jews as a crucial American business force, the decline of America's Protestant establishment, and the transformation of American cities.