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James McCarty was born into slavery in the late 1710s in Shrewsbury, Monmouth County, New Jersey, before being emancipated in 1744. As a successful free man he accumulated property before he died intestate in 1763. Leading New Jersey and Pennsylvania Quakers then worked to fulfill McCarty's wish that his wealth be used to secure the freedom of his relatives who were still enslaved. It took the Quakers involved almost five years before they achieved their goal because they had to overcome discriminatory laws, enslavers' resistance, and divisions within the Quaker community itself. Over the ensuing decades, they exhibited a persevering, paternalistic benevolence in protecting and caring for Mc-Carty's kinfolk. Their experience in the McCarty imbroglio changed the Quakers' thinking about slavery and emancipation and advanced the emerging antislavery movement during a seminal period on the eve of the American Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I decompose the market value of Colonial New Jersey's paper money into its component parts, namely its real-asset present value and transaction premium. Its market value was predominately determined by its real-asset present value. I also find a small transaction premium that is positively associated with the quantity of paper money in circulation and with the land-bank method of paper money injection. This paper money was not a fiat currency. It traded below face value due to time-discounting not depreciation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forensic accounting is used to reconstruct the data on emissions, redemptions, and bills outstanding for colonial New Jersey paper money. These components are further separated into the amounts initially legislated and the amounts actually executed. These data are substantial improvements over what currently exists in the literature. They also provide a more complete and nuanced accounting of colonial New Jersey's paper money regime than what has been done previously for any British North American colony. Enough detail of the forensic accounting exercise is given for scholars to reproduce the data series from the original sources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent archaeological excavations and documentary research have shed light on a once-vibrant and long-lasting tradition of earthfast architecture in New Jersey. This tradition persisted in the state from the period of initial settlement into the 19th century and was utilized by individuals of varied social, economic, ethnic, and occupational backgrounds. Earthfast architecture proved advantageous when masonry building materials were scarce, household economies were meager, skilled masons were expensive, and land tenure was questionable. The use of this architectural technique in New Jersey appears to have reflected a set of phenomena different than that previously identified in the Chesapeake region to the south, and was one of many options available to builders erecting vernacular structures from the 17th into the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]