Jersey City and Its Historic Sites

A window into a world that barely exists anymore. Written in the late 19th century when the old Jersey City was still visible beneath the new, Eaton pieces together a narrative that begins with the Lenni Lenape Indians who called this land Sheyichbi. She reconstructs their way of life with an ethnographic richness that feels startlingly modern: their customs, their community structures, their fatal hospitality toward European arrivals. Then comes the Dutch, the treaties, the slow transformation of the landscape into something unrecognizable. What makes this book endure is not just what it documents, but how: with the urgency of someone watching a world vanish before their eyes. For readers who love urban history, early American studies, or anyone curious about what this land looked like before it became a city.