Special Collections and University Archives: Popular Culture

Items related to the history of Rutgers University and the City of New Brunswick.

Online history hub with photographs, documents, objects, and reference books on Middlesex County history.

Digitized collection of historic New Brunswick-area postcards.

Publications about New Jersey, including books, photographs, and postcards.

Online exhibition presented by the Morven Museum & Garden of New Jersey graphic history. Featuring 120 original works executed between 1761 and 1898, the exhibit offers a visual iconography of the state beginning with a pre-Revolutionary landscape and ending with a birds eye view of a growing New Jersey city on the eve of the 20th century. Featuring historical prints, picturesque landscapes, and architectural and city views, Portrait of Place presents visual images that 18th- and 19th-century residents of New Jersey would have encountered in their day-to-day lives.

The All Aboard digital exhibition tells the story of New Jersey railroads from the early experiments by John Stevens on his estate in Hoboken to the heyday of passenger rail and freight transport of the early 20th century. Other themes highlighted in the exhibition are technology, immigration, suburbanization, bridges and depots, and the development of agricultural, bedroom, and resort communities. The digital exhibition features images of rare broadsides, manuscripts, pamphlets, and photographs documenting the history of railroads in the Garden State from Rutgers University Libraries' collections. This digital exhibition is a version of the physical exhibition All Aboard! Railroads and New Jersey, 1812–1930, which was on display in the Special Collections and University Archives Gallery in Fall 2011.

The theme of this exhibition is music in town and gown and how the two are tied together, both physically and metaphorically, by the Raritan River. It focuses on how a thriving musical scene developed in the small river and railroad city of New Brunswick in the late 19th century. It traces the early history of music at Rutgers University from the foundation of the Glee Club, one of the oldest and most prominent collegiate groups in the country, to the incorporation of music into Rutgers' educational mission in the early 20th century, and the eventual shift from city venues and local performers to university spaces and student and faculty musicians. This digital exhibit is based on the physical exhibition, On the Banks of the Raritan, which was on display in Fall 2014. It features images of rare photographs, publications, sheet music, and diary entries written by New Brunswick citizens.

The Maps of New Jersey portal charts over 300 years of the state’s development from multiple perspectives: geographic, geologic, political, environmental, historical.