Ni-có-man, The Answer, Second Chief by George Catlin. From the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Original Residents of New Jersey

By Taylor Smith

The “grandfathers” or “ancient ones” as the Lenni-Lenape people are known, were the historic inhabitants of large swaths of the Northeastern United States. Originally occupying parts of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, the Lenape suffered forced migrations and removal to reservations at the hands of European settlers. In fact, prior to the 1600s, the Lenape lived all over the Northeastern woodlands and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, as noted on nanticokelenapemuseum.org. The Lenape trace their lineage to the Nanticoke or “Tidewater People” who resisted British colonial intrusion to the best of their abilities. The name “Nanticoke” references the Nanticoke River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

At the time of European contact in the early 1600s, the Lenape were estimated to number over 20,000 people. A powerful and influential tribe, early Dutch settlers sought to establish amicable relations with the Lenape through trade of tools, sugar, firearms, animal pelts, and fabric. Unfortunately, like most early contact between Native Americans and European immigrants, tribespeople were deceived and diminished by unfair trade agreements and the introduction of contagious diseases.

Dutch traders were established on the banks of the Delaware River by 1623. Swedish and Finnish colonists followed, significantly predating the arrival of German and English travelers in response to the establishment of William Penn’s colony. Familiar with the forests of Northern Europe, the Nordic immigrants cleared woodland in the new territory and introduced the use of the log cabin. What little is known of these early encounters between the Swedes and the Lenape is that both groups were independent, rugged individualists who practiced similar agricultural methods, rotating productive fields of crops along the banks of the Delaware River, according to paheritage.wpengine.com. In contrast, the Dutch were eager to establish business in the New World. They engaged in the trade of land, guns, and beads for beaver pelts. One of the most notorious transactions between the Dutch and the Lenape was the “purchase” of New York City in 1626.

Long before high rise buildings and endless concrete sidewalks, New York City was truly an idyllic island, scattered with hills and marshland and teeming with plant and wildlife. Oak and hickory forests dotted the landscape while black bears, wildcats, beavers, tree frogs, oysters, mink, brook trout, and bog turtles roamed free. In a 2020 New York Times article, ecologist Eric W. Sanderson of the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo, noted that wolves were known to live on Manhattan until the 1720s and whales were an important part of the local ecosystem.

“Mannahatta” (as it was referred to in the Lenape language) was a trading hub for the Lenape bands of tribes who regularly gathered on the island for the exchange of goods. Mannahatta was also the site of Lenape games and musical performances. The native dwellers certainly made use of the plethora of natural resources at their disposal. For example, soaring tulip trees were favored for making canoes and the rich soil and pond water was ideal for cultivating vegetables and oyster estuaries.  more

Sylvia Beach standing with author Stephen Vincent Benét in the doorway of the Shakespeare and Company store.

PU Digital Project Explores the Iconic Bookstore’s Influence in Literary History

By Wendy Greenberg| Images courtesy of Shakespeare and Company Project, Princeton University shakespeareandcompany.princeton.edu

It was a place where writers and artists — many of whom were expatriate Americans — met and formed a community of their own. The Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s was a home to many, a place to replenish the intellect and refresh the spirit, and even a place where mail was delivered. It was where literary luminaries such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Archibald MacLeish may have crossed paths.

Shakespeare and Company was the creation of Sylvia Beach, who in 1919 arrived in Paris via Princeton, recognized a market for English language books, and offered encouragement and support to the writers who bought, browsed, and borrowed.

The bookstore closed in 1941, but Princeton University’s digital humanities venture, the Shakespeare and Company Project (shakespeareandcompany.princeton.edu), has brought the iconic shop to life once again.

A meticulous record-keeper, Beach kept addresses, logbooks, and lending cards that show what her lively community was reading between the two World Wars: James Joyce was reading about Oscar Wilde; Simone de Beauvoir was reading Ernest Hemingway; and Hemingway himself was reading about bullfighting. The information originated in the Sylvia Beach papers — 180 boxes in the Department of Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, Princeton University Library.

Besides running a bookstore and lending library for more than a thousand members (the lending library has cards for 653 individuals, but the logbooks reveal many, many more), Beach gained celebrity by publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, when it was banned in the United States and England. In tribute to her, the road behind the Princeton Public Library is named Sylvia Beach Way. When she lived in Princeton, Beach resided on Library Place.

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