I spent the better part of the day in Monmouth, New Jersey at the 3rd Biennial New Jersey Forum, a one-day conference on New Jersey history sponsored by several historical agencies in the Garden State.
The conference was held in beautiful Wilson Hall (see picture) on the campus of Monmouth University in West Long Branch. (It was good to be back in Jersey Shore country).
After listening to historian W. Barksdale Maynard’s very interesting plenary address on Woodrow Wilson’s Princeton years, I had the privilege of chairing a session on the American Revolution in New Jersey.
The panel included three great papers on the social impact of the Revolution and the Revolutionary War in New Jersey. Michael Adelberg, an independent historian, gave a talk on the leadership of the Revolution in Monmouth County. Greg Walsh, a Ph.D candidate at Boston College, presented a paper on estate seizures and the Revolution in Essex County. James Gigantino, a professor at the University of Arkansas, presented material from his Driscoll Prize-winning University of Georgia dissertation on the abolition (or lack thereof) of slavery in New Jersey.
These papers, especially those by Adelberg and Walsh, got me thinking more deeply about some of my ongoing work on Presbyterians in the revolutionary New Jersey and the kinds of local research needed to bring this project to completion. More on that later…
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