In 1782, a small New Jersey shore town called Toms River was burned to the ground by Loyalist forces — and the chain of events that followed nearly derailed the peace negotiations ending the Revolutionary War. A privateer captain named Joshua Huddy was executed without a trial for a murder he didn't commit. A twenty-year-old British officer named Charles Asgill was condemned to die in retaliation — for an act he also had nothing to do with. And Queen Marie Antoinette personally intervened to save his life, only to face her own execution a decade later. This is the story of the Huddy Affair, the Asgill Affair, Philip White, William Franklin, and a forgotten corner of the Revolution that touched the court at Versailles.

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Battle of Toms River Re-enactment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUTBhrLzd1Q

Contact me for the source list

Most people don't know that Stella D'oro cookies were once made right here in New Jersey. This episode tells the full story — from the brand's 1930 Bronx origins at the hands of Italian immigrant Joseph Kresevich, to its Swiss Fudge cookie becoming a beloved staple in Italian and Jewish American households, through decades of community, corporate upheaval, and a bitter eleven month labor strike — and lands right here in the Garden State, where for a brief but real chapter in the mid-2000s, the Star of Gold was a New Jersey story.

Until it went to Ohio....

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Every March 19th, Italian and Italian American communities celebrate the Feast of Saint Joseph — but do you know the real history behind it? In this episode, we trace the tradition from a medieval Sicilian famine to the Holy Family's flight to Egypt, to the bakeries of Naples, all the way to New Jersey. We also clear up a common confusion...

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Saint Joseph's Day, zeppole, Italian American, New Jersey, Italian food history, Catholic tradition, feast day, Sicilian tradition, pastry history, March 19

Sources:

1. Visititaly.eu — History and origins of Zeppole di San Giuseppe

2. Visit Naples — The Egypt legend, Saint Joseph as fritter maker, Cavalcanti recipe

3. The Takeout — Zeppole as a New Jersey tradition, regional Italian variations

4. Verrilli’s Bakery, Morristown NJ — Founded 1898, one of New Jersey’s first Italian bakeries

5. Bible Gateway — James 5:16

On March 14, 1891, eleven Sicilian immigrants were dragged from a New Orleans jail and murdered by a mob of thousands — making it one of the largest mass lynchings in American history. No one was ever prosecuted.

In this episode, we explore the murder of Police Chief David Hennessy, the trial that enraged a city, and the morning a mob decided that justice wasn't enough. We also dig into a truth that American history often glosses over: lynching was never limited to one group. It was a tool of social control aimed at anyone deemed outside the boundaries of full humanity.

We also cover the diplomatic crisis that nearly sparked a war with Italy, the shocking public figures who defended the mob, and the city of New Orleans' formal apology — which didn't come until 2019.

This is a good way to ease us into our discussion of UFOs, which is coming shortly. The topic for this episode came from a follower, which then got me thinking. This episode begins with a fictional vignette and then jumps right into the sky in January of 1793. We all know of the Hindenburg disaster of 1937, but how many know about this successful touchdown on NJ soil?

In this episode, we will see five presidents on the grounds of a prison, a famous Frenchman, and a lot of perplexed New Jersey locals.

Email me with questions and episode suggestions- I've gotten a lot of good ones, including this one:

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You've opened that white box with blue script lettering a thousand times. The coffee crumb cake. The chocolate fudge-iced cake. The glazed donuts that disappeared before the guests even sat down. But did you ever stop to wonder who put it there?

This week on the New Jersey History Podcast, we're telling the story of Martha Schneider — born 1906 on Jefferson Street in Hoboken, New Jersey, the daughter of a German immigrant baker from Jersey City. She left Hudson County at 19, married into the Entenmann family on Long Island, and when her husband William Entenmann Jr. died in 1951, she took over the company and changed American food culture forever.

She embraced the see-through cellophane window on the box. She brought Entenmann's factories and outlet stores back to New Jersey — Little Falls, Edison, Blackwood. And when the company went public in 1976, her face was on the stock certificate.

Oh — and Frank Sinatra? Also from Hoboken. Standing weekly order for the crumb coffee cake—every single week.

This is a story about immigrant families, Hudson County tenements, female entrepreneurship before anyone called it that, and the little white box that sat on every New Jersey kitchen table when company came over.

Before Atlantic City. Before the mega-arenas. There was a room on Route 70 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey where Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis Jr. took the stage. The Latin Casino was a 2,000-seat dinner theater that became one of the most celebrated entertainment venues in America — and most people outside of South Jersey have never heard of it. In this episode, we tell the full story. How it started in Philadelphia. What a night there actually looked like. Who played it, what it cost, and what happened when Atlantic City changed everything. Plus — how the same room that hosted Sinatra became Emerald City Disco, and the rock club where The Cure played their first American show. This is South Jersey history. This is American entertainment history. And it all happened on a highway in Cherry Hill.

Before Atlantic City. Before the mega-arenas. There was a room on Route 70 in Cherry Hill, New Jersey where Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sammy Davis Jr. took the stage. The Latin Casino was a 2,000-seat dinner theater that became one of the most celebrated entertainment venues in America — and most people outside of South Jersey have never heard of it. In this episode, we tell the full story. How it started in Philadelphia. What a night there actually looked like. Who played it, what it cost, and what happened when Atlantic City changed everything. Plus — how the same room that hosted Sinatra became Emerald City Disco, and the rock club where The Cure played their first American show. This is South Jersey history. This is American entertainment history. And it all happened on a highway in Cherry Hill.

This episode opens with a short fictional vignette set at the edge of order and wilderness, then turns to the historical record.

At its center is Giovanni Battista Sartori, an Italian pasta maker operating a commercial works in Trenton in the early 1800s—supplying elite households, including Thomas Jefferson, navigating Atlantic trade during the Embargo Act, and remaining prominent when Joseph Bonaparte, former King of Naples, arrived in New Jersey in exile.

Food becomes the through-line: a way to trace power, foreignness, faith, and continuity in a young state already plugged into global networks. The Jersey Devil appears not as a legend to be explained, but as a witness to a world in transition.

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#NewJerseyHistory #ItalianAmericanHistory #Foodways

Selected Sources:

United States House of Representatives. Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 10th Cong., 2nd sess.
November 25, 1808.

Thomas Jefferson. Memorandum of Payments. November 29, 1809.
Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
(Records payment to John B. Sartori of Trenton for two boxes of macaroni, 25 lbs each.)

———. Correspondence referencing supply from “Sartori’s works at Trenton.” 1809.
Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Before Italian neighborhoods, parishes, and pizza on the boardwalk, there was a quieter beginning.

This episode explores the story of Giovanni Battista Sartori, widely regarded as the first Italian immigrant to settle in New Jersey around 1800. Arriving alone in Trenton, Sartori entered a place with no Italian community, no Catholic church, and no established space for what he brought with him.

Through history and a brief fictional vignette, this episode examines how arrival shapes perception—how food, faith, and enterprise functioned as early infrastructure long before Italian American life became visible in neighborhoods across the state. It sets the lens for the series that follows.

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#ItalianAmericanHistory #NewJerseyHistory #ImmigrationHistory #Foodways #RootsSeries

Diocese of Trenton. History of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Trenton. Trenton, NJ: Diocese of Trenton, n.d.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Julian P. Boyd et al. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950–.

San Felese Society of New Jersey. “Early Italian Presence in Trenton.”