#167 Ohhhh! Whaddabout New Jersey?

The History of the Americans

Jack Henneman

History

4.9 • 632 Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New Jersey is something of a puzzle, especially as a matter of early colonial history. The future Garden State rates barely a mention in most surveys of American history until it becomes a primary battleground of the American Revolution. That happens, however, not because of anything in New Jersey that was particularly worth defending in and of itself, but because of its location between the two most important cities in English North America in 1776, New York and Philadelphia. But even that is puzzling. One look at the map tells us that New Jersey is fundamentally a big fat peninsula between the two most commercially important rivers of mid-17^th century North America – the lower Hudson and the Delaware. It certainly seems strategic. It is therefore a little surprising that it was not settled in any meaningful way until after most of lower New England, Long Island, New York, Maryland, and Virginia. With few exceptions, the Dutch settled on the east bank of the Hudson, and the Swedes on the west bank of the Delaware. New Jersey did not come in for meaningful European settlement until after the Duke of York took over New Netherland, and even then took ages to really get off the ground. Why was that?

This episode answers that question!

Selected references for this episode

John E. Pomfret, Province of East New Jersey, 1609-1702: The Rebellious Proprietary

The Concession and Agreement of the Lords Proprietors of the Province of New Caesarea, or New Jersey, to and With All and Every the Adventurers and All Such as Shall Settle or Plant There

George Carteret

Ohhhhh! The New Jersey Game Show (SNL)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 167.
0:11.1	I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on October 15th, 2024, in Princeton, New Jersey.
0:24.8	We are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without intentional presentism. Okay, let's talk about New Jersey,
0:33.5	the state of many binaries and relatively little actual identity, at least compared to many other American states.
0:43.1	New Jersey has, from almost the beginning, lived in the shadows of New York and Philadelphia.
0:49.8	Even in the 1970s, when I first lived there or here, in that I am in New Jersey as I speak these words,
0:58.4	New Jersey didn't have its own network television station.
1:02.1	New York and Philly stations would deign to cover a little New Jersey news in the evenings,
1:07.2	probably because they were worried the FCC would put in a competitor across the
1:11.1	river if they didn't. People cheered for Philadelphia or New York teams. Rarely both. And when the
1:18.7	latter moved to New Jersey, they still said they were the New York Giants and Jets. What other state
1:25.4	would tolerate that indignity? Back in the day, people in the western
1:30.4	part of the state took the Philadelphia Inquirer. And in the eastern, they read the New York
1:35.3	Times or the Daily News if they wanted sports and comics. In the West, they knew where to get a great
1:41.9	cheese steak. And in the east, they knew about calzons and pizza and such.
1:48.4	In the west, they have beautiful horse farms and practice dressage. And in the east, the sopranos is the stuff of local pride.
1:58.5	They even went down the shore to different places in the summer, the northern
2:03.0	shore towns looking to New York and the southern to Philly. It would be anachronistic,
2:08.6	God forbid, to suggest these binaries descend from colonial times when the state was divided
2:14.9	into two provinces west and east. But they are related to the same
2:19.8	basic problem. Our most densely populated state has never had a really impressive and important city.
2:27.5	So it extracted a sort of derivative identity from the commercial, political, and cultural centers
	...

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