During the American Revolution, Great Britain hired thirty thousand German troops to fight rebellious colonists. Five thousand of those troops marched across New Jersey from Princeton and Trenton all the way to the northern tip of Sussex County. Though popular legend would cast them as cold and vicious mercenaries, many were prisoners of war with little choice. Stories of their exploits still circulate in New Jersey, from the headless Hessian of the Morristown Swamp to the mysterious Ramap...

German immigrants and their descendants are integral to New Jersey's history. When the state was young, they founded villages that are now well-established communities, such as Long Valley. Many German immigrants were lured by the freedom and opportunity in the Garden State, especially in the nineteenth century, as they escaped oppression and revolution. German heroes have played a patriotic part in the state's growth and include scholars, artists, war heroes and industrialists, such as Jo...

The New Jersey Butterflies, officially the Third New Jersey Cavalry, was formed for the last year of the Civil War. They were also known as the First American Hussars; their creation by an alcoholic ex-officer of the Union Army was supposed to entice men to join a galloping, dashing, romantic cavalry unit. Clothed in orange gilt trimmed hats and capes, they were supposed to charge armed only with a saber, in most traditional European Cavalry fashion, into battle and subdue an enemy armed w...

The immigrant communities in New York, for example, Little Italy, Frankfurt on the Hudson (Inwood) in Manhattan, Arthur Avenue (Bronx), Ridgewood (Queens), Bedford Avenue (Brooklyn), produced many heroes in America over the past three centuries. There are family tales and folklore about ancestors, good and bad, who traversed the oceans to get a fresh start in America. They include “jumping ship,” names changed on Ellis Island upon arrival, and apocryphal tales of nobility, military, and sc...

Carl Schurz was a larger-than-life public figure whose exploits, real and concocted appeared in newspapers nationwide during the nineteenth century. His letters to Fanny Chapman, his secret love, leave a picture of an age of turmoil, corruption, social graces, and artistic explosion. It took a renaissance man like Carl Schurz to travel among the greats in the literary, artistic and political arenas with grace and judgement. The tragedy of his life, if there was one, is that he is nearly fo...

One hundred years ago, the world suffered a brutal and destructive conflict. The Great War, World War I, or the War to End All Wars, by whatever name, cost the lives and the fortunes of millions of people. The modern world, now concerned with its own problems and conflicts, has pushed the memory of it deep into the recesses of collective memory. The veterans and the war dead are honored and memorialized annually; however, the ongoing destructive influence of this time on the personal lives...