Most New Jerseyans know him as a bridge on the Garden State Parkway. But Driscoll earned that immortality as the first governor empowered by the Constitution of 1947. As a reformer, a champion of civil rights, and a conservationist, Driscoll set the template for future activist governors. He served from 1947 to 1954....
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New Jersey had one of the weakest governor’s offices in the country until the state Constitution was rewritten after World War II. The war and the New Deal had shown the importance of strong executive guidance, leading to the revisions. Today, the state has perhaps the most powerful governor’s office in the nation....
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William Livingston was born in Albany in 1723, a member of a wealthy Hudson Valley family. He attended Yale and set up shop as a politically connected lawyer in New York City, but when he and his family fell out of favor in 1772, he, like many other disillusioned New Yorkers through the years, moved to New Jersey....
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A tarpaper shack that could be rotated to catch the sun was America’s first motion picture studio. Thomas Edison’s 1888 “Black Maria” put New Jersey at the center of a revolutionary new medium and big-time business....
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Who was she? Did she really even exist? We know her real name was not Molly Pitcher—that was the nickname she earned on the battlefield, perhaps while bringing water to parched soldiers....
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(1885–1977) A suffrage activist who lived to see the nation’s bicentennial, Paul, a Quaker from Moorestown, earned a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and law degrees from Columbia and American universities at a time when few women attended college. She not only advocated for women’s voting rights, in 1964 she helped persuade Congress to add a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act....
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This local dispute garnered national attention. In the end, workers didn’t get everything they wanted, but the strike captured the imaginations of activists around the country, even in New York City—perhaps the last time an injustice in New Jersey received attention on the east bank of the Hudson....
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His last day on Earth was spent in New Jersey. On the cliffs overlooking the North River (as the Hudson was called) and Manhattan Island, he was shot by the vice president of the United States, Aaron Burr, during a duel....
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The media, including this magazine, have been chronicling the 40th anniversary of Newark’s catastrophic summer of 1967...
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Lords Berkeley (1607–1678) and Carteret (1610–1680) They were much more than upper-class white males with fancy hairdos and flowing robes....
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(1902–1974) Lucky Lindy, the greatest American hero of the Jazz Age, moved to New Jersey after his marriage to Anne Morrow in 1929, two years after he became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean....
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George Washington’s surprise attack turned the tide for the stars and stripes....
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Her classmates at Newark’s East Side High School voted her Most Likely to Succeed, and that she did. She earned her master’s degree at Montclair State and her Ph.D. from Columbia University....
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(1902-1962) Her research for the NAACP helped convince the Supreme Court in 1954 that separate is not equal in education. After graduating from Barringer High School in Newark, Wright became the first African-American woman in the U.S. to earn a Ph.D. in history (from Columbia, in 1940)....
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Among the more than 100 patents he obtained while working for RCA, Rajchman developed the electron multiplier calculating device; the read-only memory computer system; the magnetic information-handling system (core memory); and the electronic microcopy apparatus. Your computer would not be the same without Rajchman’s innovations....
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Leo H. Sternbach of Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. in Nutley is known as the father of Valium—a synthesis of the vitamin biotin and the compound 1,4 benzodiazepine. Valium was the bestselling drug in America from 1969 to 1982. Sternbach died in 2005, at age 97, with more than 230 patents to his credit....
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The Intelligent Network Services Architecture, developed by Weber for AT&T at Bell Labs in Holmdel, was integral in flexible customer services such as the 800 number, calling cards, and software-defined network arrangements....
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The Hoboken resident pioneered the use of steam for transportation. He initiated the first regular ferry service from New Jersey to New York, designed and built the first American steam locomotive, and developed the first seagoing steamship. He proposed a vehicular tunnel under the Hudson River and an elevated railroad in New York City....
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John Bardeen and Walter Brattain met as grad students at Princeton. With William Shockley, Bardeen’s manager at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, they won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for their invention....
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