The Rise and Fall of America's Most Hated State: New Jersey

Описание: New Jersey is the most densely populated state in America, yet a million acres of its southern interior are pine forest so empty that the iron furnaces built there two centuries ago vanished into the trees. This documentary traces the state's history from its founding as two separate colonies — East Jersey and West Jersey — through Alexander Hamilton's industrial experiment at the Great Falls of the Passaic River, the rise of Paterson as Silk City, the canal and railroad monopolies that turned the state into the nation's toll corridor, and the 1889 incorporation law that made New Jersey the legal home of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and nearly every major corporate trust in the Gilded Age. It follows the boom and long decline of Atlantic City, from its grand Boardwalk hotels and Prohibition-era spectacle through the casino era and its collapse when neighboring states legalized gambling. It covers the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, Edison's Invention Factory at Menlo Park, the pharmaceutical corridor that made the state the medicine chest of the world, and the construction of the New Jersey Turnpike — the highway that reorganized the state's economy and gave it its most enduring cultural shorthand. Along the way, the script examines the postwar suburban explosion, the hollowing out of Newark and Camden, the property tax crisis rooted in 565 separate municipalities, and the deeper question of what it means to be a state whose identity has always been defined by the two great cities on either side of it.
Sources

Howard Gillette Jr., Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)
Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (Penguin Press, 2012)
Charles M. Yablon, "The Historical Race Competition for Corporate Charters and the Rise and Decline of New Jersey: 1880–1910," Iowa Journal of Corporation Law, Vol. 32, No. 2 (University of Iowa, 2007)
National Park Service, "Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park: City of Industry" (nps.gov)
Angus Kress Gillespie and Michael Aaron Rockland, Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike (Rutgers University Press, 1989)
John McPhee, The Pine Barrens (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968)