Founded in 1666 along the Passaic River by Puritans arriving from the New Haven colony farther east, Newark emerged in the nineteenth century at the forefront of industry and commerce. Benefiting from the Morris Canal, leather tanneries, breweries, banking, insurance, and other enterprises, the city attracted the best and the brightest, among them patent leather inventor Seth Boyden, voltmeter inventor Edward Weston, and a young Thomas Edison, who established a manufacturing plant in the city for his improved telegraph.

Historic Photos of Newark is a pictorial journey through time that traces the story of this great American city, from the early days of photography in the 1860s to the postwar era immediately following World War II. Reproduced in vivid black-and-white, nearly 200 photographs, each one captioned and with introductions, offer unforgettable vignettes of the city and its citizens as Newark navigated good times and bad over these defining and monumental decades.