The drive was organized by Wendy C. Nielsen (English Department), in collaboration with Jennifer Dudeck‑Lenis (Social Work and Child Advocacy) and Jeff Gonzalez (English), who delivered the donations to Bridge of Books in Monmouth County. Contributors included but are not limited to the Child Advocacy Club (President Jaclyn Alicea and Secretary Ashley Rahill, mentored by Nydia Monagas and Jennifer Dudeck‑Lenis), the English Club (advised by Jeffrey Gonzalez), Steffi Dippold (History and English), Laura Nicosia (English and ISST), Wendy Nielsen, their students, and English alumna Chloe Driscoll.

Access to books is access to possibility. This collaboration showed what our community can accomplish together—from student leaders and alumni to staff and faculty—so more New Jersey kids can become addicted to reading and the world of imagination.
– Wendy C. Nielsen, faculty organizer

About Bridge of Books Foundation
Founded in New Jersey in 2003, Bridge of Books has grown from a volunteer‑led effort into a statewide partner that collects and distributes books through drives, individual donations, publishers, and community events—always with the goal of getting as many books as possible into the hands of kids who need them.

Memory across Time and Disciplines is an interdisciplinary conference that brings together researchers from the sciences, humanities, and technology to explore the diverse ways memory is formed, stored, forgotten, and recovered. By bringing together scientists, historians, archivists, geologists, linguists, technologists, and artists, the conference aims to uncover the deep connections between how we remember—whether through neurons, fossils, books, or bytes. This conference will not only highlight cutting-edge research but also inspire new ways of thinking about memory in a rapidly changing world.

Organizing Committee, �鶹��ý����
Deborah Chatr Aryamontri (Dept. of Classics & General Humanities)
Dawn Hayes (Dept. of History)
Sophia Hudzik (Dept. of Classics & General Humanities)
Joanna Madloch (Dept. of Classics & General Humanities)
Greg Pope (Dept. of Earth & Environmental Studies)
Timothy Renner (Dept. of Classics & General Humanities)
Peter Siegel (Dept. of Anthropology)

Sponsored by the Center for Heritage and Archaeological Studies and the Department of Classics and General Humanities, �鶹��ý���� and with a contribution of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States

The conference will be held in-person and virtually. Join the conference on campus in Schmitt Hall, Room 327, or via (passcode: 521293).

View the program schedule below.

The NSP digitally registers, maps and analyzes the monuments erected during Sicily’s Norman period (ca. 1061-1194), arguably the most auspicious years in its long history. In so doing, the project provides new interpretations of the complex society that produced them, understandings made possible by a collaboration between history and STEM and made broadly accessible by digital technologies. With this grant, the team, which includes Dr. Casey Allen, Lecturer in Environmental/Earth Science at The University of The West Indies, Barbados, and Cultural Stone Stability Index Specialist for the Stone Heritage Research Alliance, Dr. Craig MacDonald, Associate Professor and Director of Pratt Institute’s Center for Digital Experiences, Mr. Joseph Hayes, Senior Software Engineer in the private sector, and Dr. Deepak Bal, Associate Professor in MSU’s Department of Mathematics, will be able to produce a fully functioning web app optimized for user experience and the public engagement of multiple audiences that clearly guides visitors while offering additional classes of monuments beyond the monasteries it currently contains (including stability triage for a subset of each), an integrated kinship network of associated people, and interpretation of the site’s data. Flexible and adaptable, the NSP presents a new model for digital conservation of cultural heritage.

The field school will include a blend of traditional classroom learning, fieldwork, hands-on learning, and working as part of a research team.

Specific activities include:

• working with tribal members to create a digital document archive related to the Ringwood Superfund site located in the Ramapough Turtle Clan homeland
• identifying and recording features of Native cultural heritage which may include a cemetery clean up as well as documentation of the Lenape ceremonial stone landscape
• creating resources to support tribal language learning and revitalization
• working at the tribally operated Munsee Three Sisters farm to support of Ramapough food sovereignty

The field school will meet Tuesday-Friday 4 days/week for 4 weeks 8:30am – 4:30pm. Students are expected to commit to the project full time. We will meet on the MSU campus as well as other locations including the Munsee Three Sisters Farm in Newton, NJ and the Ringwood Public Library. Transportation and meals will be provided when we visit off-campus sites. Students accepted to the field school will receive a stipend to offset personal expenses.

Please complete the following form to apply:

Application deadline: Friday, March 8, 2024, 5:00pm
Questions? Contact the programs directors at nais@montclair.edu

Download the 2024 NAIS Field Summer School Flyer

How did we get here, and what is the significance of Juneteenth? Here, Leslie Wilson, professor of History, explains.

What are the origins of Juneteenth and what is its significance?

Juneteenth is the date (June 19, 1865) when General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Union Army came to the Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, to announce that the Union Army had arrived in the state to depose the Confederate Army in the state.

For many this was seen as one of the acts that brought the Civil War to an end. One of the three military orders General Granger read that day restated the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation by informing the citizens and enslaved people in the state that slavery was abolished and that the slaves were now free. This order, Order Number Three reads as follows:

“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

This declaration officially ended slavery in Texas and turned enslaved men and women into workers. Their masters were transformed into employers. What was not clear were the terms of housing, as they were told to return to their homes and work for wages. In essence, they were turned into landed service workers or laborers.

How is Juneteenth observed? What are some ways an individual can observe the holiday?

Although there were celebrations that day, the first official Juneteenth celebrations were held on June 19, 1866. Juneteenth started in Galveston and Houston, and quickly spread throughout the west.

The Juneteenth festivities have been held on June 19 ever since. Over the decades, Juneteenth has meant barbecue, red velvet cake, ice cream, red punch, watermelon and other food items. There has been dancing, music and bands, singing, praise worship, rodeos, sporting activities, beauty contests (Miss Juneteenth) and parades.

Juneteenth became a state holiday in Texas in 1979. It was the first African American holiday celebrated before the celebrations honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1970s. It became a national holiday in 2021, and there is also a Juneteenth flag.

What’s the impact of Juneteenth being declared a federal holiday?

Juneteenth is seen as the symbolic end to slavery in the United States. It is not the official date for the end of the war or the end of slavery, but rather the moment that people in the west chose to celebrate the beginning of the transition from enslavement to freedom.

It was a long road: General Granger’s men needed to protect the integrity of his order. Other Union troops had to travel further west to parts of Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico spreading the word that the Confederacy had been defeated and that slavery was over.

The spiritual connection, which makes Juneteenth a lasting holiday, is that when Texans moved and brought the holiday with them others embraced it along with their own local emancipation days. In many locations, people celebrated the local emancipation day and Juneteenth. However, Juneteenth has more staying power. For example, in New York and New Jersey the Emancipation Proclamation is the original day of freedom, but Juneteenth has long overtaken it.

Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans but how did it mark just the beginning of the fight for equality?

General Granger’s order does not speak of freedom and equality. It introduces abolition, but not freedom. The enslaved are tied to the land of their former masters. Decades will go by before true freedom emerges in Texas and other southern states.

By the 1920s, when Juneteenth was extremely popular, there were race riots in Texas and Oklahoma. African American pride is strong and Juneteenth is used to mobilize people to fight for equality. The pride associated with Juneteenth ebbs and flows, but this is what gives the holiday staying power.

In the 1960s and 1970s Juneteenth was associated with civil rights, equality and voting rights. It is a visualization of Black Power. It also draws strength from the African American church as an affirmation of struggle and survival.

Dr. Wilson also recently joined NPR’s Morning Edition to discuss the history of Juneteenth.

“Early in the 1960s and 70s, a conservationist attitude and mentality put other forms of life in the center. A more biocentric kind of focus with the environmentalist movements started to recognize non-human species as endangered of disappearing and vanishing as well, and that process impacts individuals and communities who are living in proximity with nature,” Rashkow says.

Read the full article and listen to the podcast

Written by Donaelle Benoit

This two-day, hybrid interdisciplinary event will explore the ways in which people from different time periods and geographic areas of the world have faced issues in the harnessing, control, and usage of water as well as how this indispensable resource has shaped those cultures. The conference, the second of the ‘Bridging the Gap’ series, will bring together national and international professionals and scholars who will discuss water as a socio-cultural phenomenon; human impacts on water environment and soil and weathering processes in the exploitation of water; and sustainable urban and regional planning, public health, environmental management and population prediction in connection with water supply and usage.

In line with last year’s successful hybrid conference, the organizing committee, composed of Deborah Chatr Aryamontri and Timothy Renner (both in the Dept. of Classics & General Humanities), Dawn Hayes (), Peter Siegel (), Greg Pope and Danlin Yu (both in the Dept. of Earth & Environmental Studies), wants to promote and foster awareness of the interdisciplinary effort needed in the investigation, preservation, and daily management of such a vital resource.

“It’s definitely a great place to start, but hopefully it’s not where we stop,” says Farrah Fornarotto, a junior majoring in Anthropology, with minors in Archaeology and the new Native American and Indigenous Studies. “There’s a lot to tackle.”

The challenges date back decades. Munsee Three Sisters Farm provides traditional food for the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Nation, a tribe that can no longer safely farm its own land in Upper Ringwood, New Jersey. Environmental and health issues caused by industrial dumping have led to a generational decline in the Turtle Clan members’ ability to practice their culture, including the Munsee language, which is at risk of becoming as dormant as the winter fields.

An intensive, field-based partnership with the Turtle Clan Ramapough includes work at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm, where �鶹��ý���� students and professors are helping the tribe’s Indigenous food sovereignty and language revitalization efforts.

A key aspect of �鶹��ý����’s contributions are organizing the tribe’s records and documents related to the industrial dumping on ancestral land. Students are at work to help gather the scientific evidence documented at the Superfund site, the health impact and oral histories from eyewitnesses, and with University resources, creating a single, digitally accessible repository for future researchers and the tribal members who continue to fight for proper cleanup of the land.

More than 300 pages of newspaper articles detailing the dumping of toxic paint sludge from a Ford Motor Co. factory have been indexed by students. “My students are going through and creating a table of contents identifying the names [of key players], the toxic chemicals listed in reports, physical sites that are listed, agencies that are listed, and creating a searchable tool for that whole collection of news articles,” says Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program.

�鶹��ý���� students taking part in the class projects say they share a commitment for helping Indigenous communities. Jala Best, a senior Psychology major, says her drive comes from her experiences as an Afro-Indigenous woman.

“Oftentimes the issues of Native communities are ignored or Native people are spoken about in the past tense, like we are not still living, breathing, surviving and fighting for justice …. You can’t even conceptualize that there are atrocities happening today because you believe that it’s a thing of the past,” Best says.

Mark Clatterbuck, right, oversees the garden signage with students Camille Howard, Julia Rodano and Farrah Fornarotto. “It’s the small things that build up, and eventually over time, the Turtle Clan’s language will be more visible to them and also to the public,” Fornarotto says.

�鶹��ý���� has initiated a field-based partnership with Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation. The University support includes students working directly with the tribe on food sovereignty, the language revitalization effort and ongoing environmental concerns as part of �鶹��ý����’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

“The issues and the challenges of the Turtle Clan, they’re huge, they’re varied and there’s no shortage of them,” says Clatterbuck.

The program is closely tied to the University’s Land Acknowledgement Statement. Clatterbuck, along with History Professor Elspeth Martini and Anthropology Professor Chris Matthews consulted with New Jersey’s three state-recognized tribal nations – the Ramapough Lenape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and Powhatan Renape – in drafting the statement, and also considered how it could represent a commitment from �鶹��ý���� to working with and for their communities.

“It’s not just about making some sort of historical reference. It’s really about saying, ‘What is our responsibility to those communities?’” Clatterbuck says.

Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, constructs signage as part of the field work helping promote the preservation of Native American land and culture.

The program is intentionally community-engaged, hands-on and focused on problem-solving, including finding creative ways to support community-driven language revitalization and environmental recovery. “The Ramapough understand that part of their healing and survival is really dependent on recovering key aspects of their cultural ways,” Clatterbuck says. “Language is on par with restoring foodways and their access to clean water, land and air.”

Munsee language expert, Nikole Pecore, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Nation in Wisconsin, has guided �鶹��ý���� students studying Linguistic Anthropology in building a digital repository of instructional materials that will be used to train new Munsee teachers and support community learners.

“We’re looking at language as a key to culture, to bringing back Munsee speaking cultures, as well as other Lenape languages belonging to original peoples in the state of New Jersey,” says Associate Anthropology Professor Maisa Taha.

Work on the farm also includes students preparing the fields and helping deliver the organic, healthy, medicinal healing crops to the community. “It’s doing the nitty-gritty work with local communities and following their lead,” Clatterbuck says.

Meryem Teke, a senior Religion major, paints a garden sign at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm. The work is among the creative ways �鶹��ý���� is supporting the Turtle Clan’s language revitalization and environmental recovery.

“It might be challenging to figure out how all of these different pieces fit together. But the fact of the matter is they are all intimately connected,” Taha says. “You can’t have language without culture. You can’t have culture without tribal sovereignty. You can’t have tribal sovereignty without environmental justice. What we’re bringing to our students and frankly, to ourselves as well, is this huge opportunity to work with our tribal partners in trying to understand those connections and come up with reasonable, impactful solutions that will serve them for years to come.”

Clatterbuck adds, “We’re all passionate about this on a personal level, and we see this as a matter of justice and addressing – you hear the buzzword ‘decolonization’ thrown around a lot – but as far as I’m concerned, this is what that work looks like. It’s messy, and it’s trial and error, and we’re figuring all this out as we go. But that is the work.”

Photo Gallery

�鶹��ý����’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies is focusing on issues of indigenous sovereignty, cultural revitalization, environmental justice and language reclamation. Some of the field work is happening at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newtown, New Jersey.

�鶹��ý���� students have created signage for the Three Sisters Farm in the Munsee language. The illustrations will help tribal members as well as visitors to the farm visually connect the pictures and actual plants with the Munsee word. Efforts are also underway to create audio files so that learners can hear those words when accessed by QR codes added to the signs.

A rooster at Munsee Three Sisters Farm.

Story by Staff Writer Marilyn Joyce Lehren. Photos by John J. LaRosa.

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• Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day
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Please join us! Documentary screening followed by panel discussion with filmmaker and tribal leaders!

Film Description: In September 2020 the documentary crew filmed a talking circle of Ramapough elders, relations, and partners at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm. The resulting documentary- The Meaning of the Seed – is structured along the layers of the landscape, chronologically working up from the ground to the overstory. The first section, SOIL, describes the history of contamination in Ringwood and the contaminated ground that many Native Americans live on or near. SEED recounts the struggles of the Ramapough and their cultural connections to the land. GROWTH chronicles the Ramapough’s cultural restoration program and efforts to work towards food sovereignty through their recently inaugurated Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newton, NJ. Finally, SUNLIGHT is a call to action, as the talking circle participants urge a younger generation to become involved with environmental justice movements.

The ancestral home of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Turtle Clan is Ringwood, New Jersey. The landscape includes former iron mines, Native American rock shelters, a forest in which people hunt and forage for food, a large drinking water reservoir, deep pockets of contaminated soil, streams that now flow with orange water, a stew of different chemical toxicants from the former Ford manufacturing plant, and the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. People live in the Superfund site, just upstream from the Wanaque Reservoir, which provides drinking water to millions of New Jersey residents.

Co-sponsored by:
• Departments of Anthropology, History, Linguistics, and Religion
• The Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project
• The University Senate Land Acknowledgment Committee.

For further information please contact: Chris Matthews at matthewsc@montclair.edu

The Inclusive Public History project entails faculty development, curriculum development, and student enrichment activities. The project focuses on the history of racial and ethnic groups in the United States, as it mirrors our student interests and demographics. First, the project will train faculty in public history research, methods, and scholarship through a shared reading program and guest speakers. In turn, faculty will create courses in public and digital history as well as incorporate best public history practices into their existing courses. Second, the project will enrich student educational experiences by establishing opportunities for place-based learning at public history sites and museums throughout New Jersey, New York City, and Washington DC. Importantly, faculty will gain practical experience as they lead students on site visits. The history department will further develop its curriculum in permanently establishing a place-based learning opportunity in our courses.

Jeff Strickland asserted, “Many history departments across the country, including ours, have recently begun to offer an applied history curriculum. This NEH Humanities Initiatives grant has a strong faculty development piece that will help train faculty to design a curriculum that will better engage our increasingly diverse student-body. Importantly, leading academic historians and public historians from universities around the United States will share an equal role in that faculty development process. Ultimately, we anticipate our faculty will teach a more inclusive, equitable curriculum that will improve student success and lead to enrollment growth.”

Nancy Carnevale stated, “The Inclusive Public History Project will offer students an exciting opportunity to visit public history sites and museums where they will learn how public historians are telling more inclusive stories about our nation’s history than students ordinarily hear.  At a moment when how history is taught and remembered has become a subject of intense debate, this project could not be more timely.”