09/22/2006
Electric light, Einstein and brassieres
By: Hilary Parker , Staff Writer

Historian details how New Jersey is more than the Sopranos
   When Marc Mappen, the executive director of the New Jersey Historical Commission, shared "the world's funniest joke" at the League of Women Voters of the Princeton Area meeting Monday night, his goal was not to poke fun at the Garden State.

Rather, Mr. Mappen, a former associate dean at Rutgers University, shared the joke — selected from 2 million ratings of 40,000 joke entries in a 2002 LaughLab experiment led by Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire in England — to demonstrate New Jersey's all-too-common public image.

The joke is as follows:
   "A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: 'My friend is dead! What can I do?' The operator, in a calm soothing voice, says: 'Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.' There is a silence, then a shot is heard. The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: 'OK, now what?'"

As part of his talk in the Princeton Public Library Community Room, "There's More to New Jersey than the Sopranos," Mr. Mappen explored the state's history with a crowd of nearly 50. Offering tidbits and trivia — electric lights, the brassiere and the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton all hail from New Jersey — Mr. Mappen also discussed more touchy subjects, such as New Jersey's long history of political corruption.

 Often, these issues were explored at the request of audience members, who demonstrated great interest in New Jersey women in politics in a question-and-answer session following Mr. Mappen's presentation.

Though Alice Paul — founder of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage — hailed from the Garden State, New Jersey was not one of the first to grant women the right to vote, Mr. Mappen said in response to a question about the women's movement in New Jersey. It's actually a bit more complicated than that, he said — New Jersey was the first, officially, but the right didn't last too long the first time around.

In 1776, he explained, the state constitution granted the right to vote to anyone who owned more than 50 pounds' worth of property. As the document had been drafted in a hurry, he noted, this provision unintentionally included women — whose right to vote was soon repealed by a constitutional amendment. It wasn't until the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in 1920, that women in the state were once again allowed to vote.

That may all be history, but when it comes to women in today's political sphere, New Jersey still lags behind many other states, he said.

"Women are underrepresented in New Jersey politics," he noted.

Offering an example, Mr. Mappen said there is a lower percentage of women in the New Jersey Legislature than in the Afghan legislature. One theory for this, he said, is that the current state constitution — ratified in 1947 — calls for only one statewide elected official, the governor. This means women in New Jersey don't necessarily get the political visibility they might enjoy in other states, he said. An audience member added that only one of the state's 54 governors, Christine Todd Whitman, was female.

Throughout the presentation, Princeton figured prominently in Mr. Mappen's lecture — whether it was as the home of such notables as Albert Einstein and Paul Robeson, or as the one-time capitol of the United States. After a discussion of the regionality of the state — once divided into east and west provinces and still polarized north and south, Mr. Mappen said — Princeton Township Mayor Phyllis Marchand suggested Princeton itself might be "the heart of the state."

On the north-south divide, she said, roughly half of Princetonians root for the Phillies, while the other half tends to split between the Yankees and the Mets. Attendees quickly picked up on Mayor Marchand's line of reasoning, contributing that Province Line Road is true to its name, having once served as the dividing line between New Jersey's two provinces.

 As for HBO's Emmy-award winning television show?

It was mentioned, but only briefly — clearly, there's more to New Jersey than "The Sopranos."

Link to The Princeton Packet

photos from other League events