BOOKS
Ready to Read
A MORE PROSAIC LIGHT:
ESSAYS, REVISIONS & REVIEWS, 1987-2015
November 22, 2017
The essays from the pen of Daniel Weeks in A More Prosaic Light range from social and political commentary to literary criticism and reminiscences about the literary and cultural scene on the Jersey Shore. Weeks tackles topics as diverse as Hollywood movies, middle school jitters, Thanksgiving, the dying fishing industry in New Jersey, Edison's phonograph, heat waves, the great Englishtown Auction, Romantic poetry, and the elusive American Dream. Weeks's literary essays also range widely from the poets of the British canon-Coleridge, Keats, and Yeats-to American moderns and contemporaries-Amiri Baraka, Charles Olson, Robert Pinsky, and Louise Glück. The essays and reviews here are interspersed with Weeks's reminiscences of his encounters with various writers, which provide an entertaining inside view of the literary scene on the Jersey Shore during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
GATEWAYS TO EMPIRE:
QUEBEC AND NEW AMSTERDAM TO 1664
July 15, 2019
In Gateways to Empire: Quebec and New Amsterdam to 1664, historian Daniel Weeks has provided the first comprehensive comparative study of the North-American fur-trading colonies New France and New Netherland. While neither colony profited very much, if at all, from the fur trade (though many individual fortunes were undoubtedly made), Weeks finds that New France, which far outpaced New Netherland in this trade, grew more slowly and had greater difficulty sustaining itself. As he demonstrates in Gateways to Empire, other factors, including New Netherland’s openness to religious and ethnic diversity and wider connections to the Atlantic World, allowed it to become more economically secure than its rival north of the St. Lawrence. And yet, in both cases, the principal towns of these European colonies—Quebec and New Amsterdam—moved beyond their initial purposes as hubs for trade with the indigenous peoples to become gateways to European settlement. In this, New Amsterdam, by the late 1640s, was singularly successful, so that it rapidly fostered the production of new European towns in its hinterlands, organizing the landscape for settlement and also for trade within the European-dominated Atlantic-World system.
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BOOKS
Ready to Read
NOT FOR FILTHY LUCRE'S SAKE:
RICHARD SALTAR AND THE ANTIPROPRIETARY MOVEMENT IN EAST NEW JERSEY, 1665-1707
June 1, 2001
Not for Filth Lucre's Sake tells the story of Richard Saltar -- an early settler of Freehold, New Jersey, and an ancestor of Abraham Lincoln -- who helped overthrow the oppressive proprietary government of colonial New Jersey. The book is the first in-depth study of the motivations of the antiproprietary movement.
NEARER HOME:
SHORT HISTORIES, 1987-2019
January 7, 2020
Nearer Home: Short Histories, 1987-2019 is a collection of Daniel Weeks’s historical writing—both popular and scholarly—culled from newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, newsletters and blogs. Most of the pieces deal with aspects of the history of Monmouth and Ocean counties, including the Battle of Monmouth, colonial wedding customs, antebellum horse racing, and the 1970 riots in Asbury Park. There is also a section on Thomas Edison, which covers, among other topics, the controversy surrounding the execution of the circus animal Topsy, the beginnings of recorded music, and the electrification of Pennsylvania towns in the 1880s.