How Newark Became Newark

The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City

By Brad R. Tuttle

Rutgers University Press, Rivergate Books

For the first time in forty years, the story of one of America's most maligned cities is told in all its grit and glory. With its open-armed embrace of manufacturing, Newark, New Jersey, rode the Industrial Revolution to great prominence and wealth that lasted well into the twentieth century. In the postwar years, however, Newark experienced a perfect storm of urban troublesùpolitical corruption, industrial abandonment, white flight, racial conflict, crime, poverty. Cities across the United States found themselves in similar predicaments, yet Newark stands out as an exceptional case. Its saga reflects the rollercoaster ride of Everycity U.S.A., only with a steeper rise, sharper turns, and a much more dramatic plunge.

How Newark Became Newark is a fresh, unflinching popular history that spans the city's epic transformation from a tiny Puritan village into a manufacturing powerhouse, on to its desperate struggles in the twentieth century and beyond. After World War II, unrest mounted as the minority community was increasingly marginalized, leading to the wrenching civic disturbances of the 1960s. Though much of the city was crippled for years, How Newark Became Newark is also a story of survival and hope. Today, a real estate revival and growing population are signs that Newark is once again in ascendance.

Finally, with Brad R. Tuttle's How Newark Became Newark, we have an exceedingly fresh and bold historical narrative that at once dignifies the city's complicated past and informs what must be known about its tenacity and endurance. Not since John Cunningham's Newark has any author contributed so mightily to our understanding of Newark's importance to American urban history.[ATTENTION PRESS MEMBERS: PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT THIS BLURB APPEARS FIRST WHEN BOTH BLURBS ARE LISTED IN CATALOG, ON JACKET, OR ANYWHERE ELSE. NOT SURE WHERE ELSE TO INDICATE THIS IN ALLBOOKS....THANKS, CB.] Clement Alexander Price, professor of history, Rutgers University, Newark

An absorbing and impressive 'biography' of our city, tracing both major influences and a strong cast of colorful, often corrupt characters. One must be impressed with Newark's resilience given the powerful forces Tuttle's book portrays that could have defeated the forces for good. Fr. Edwin D. Leahy, O.S.B., Headmaster, St. Benedict's Preparatory School, Newark, NJ

This is the first major history of the state's largest city in more than 40 years. Brad R. Tuttle seems determined to present a warts-and-all portrait of [Newark]. He devotes the bulk of this handsomely produced book to a well-researched and -written account of Newark's long and colorful history as one of the nation's first manufacturing hubs. Tom Mackin, Newark Star-Ledger

BRAD R. TUTTLE, a journalist, is the author of The Ellis Island Collection: Artifacts from the Immigrant Experience.

Acknowledgments

Prologue. Pride in Newark: A 300th Anniversary and a City on the Brink

Part I: Rise
1. Corporation: Sheltered Puritan Village to Teeming Industrial Hub
2. Politics to the Dogs: Southern Sympathy during the Civil War
3. Greater Newark: A Metropolis Blooms with the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Part II: Fall
4. Dead Weight: Prohibition, Politics, and the Growth of Organized Crime
5. The Slums of Ten Years from Now: A City Transformed through Postwar Urban Renewal
6. Bound to Explode: Generations of Frustration Boil Over in the Summer of 1967
7. The Worst American City: A Transfer of Power and the Dire 1970s

Part III: Rebirth
8. Sharpe Change: A New Mayor Charts the Meandering Road to Recovery
9. A Renaissance for the Rest of Us: Cory Booker Confronts the Power Structure
10. Stand Up: A New Administration, a New Arena, and Some Age-Old Struggles

Note on Sources
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

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