About

The project.

The Highlands History Project is the definitive, ongoing telling of four hundred years on the front door of America — the peninsula, the hills, the ferries, the fort, the fleet, the families. We build it in public, chapter by chapter, and hold it to the standards a museum would expect from a museum.

Mission

We're building the history in the medium the coast asks for: scrollable, cinematic, and sourced. Every chapter pairs with a growing archive of images, documents, and oral histories. Every image carries its attribution on-frame. Every claim carries a source.

The audience we're writing for is the reader on the beach with a phone: half our visitors arrive on cellular, at low battery, sitting somewhere they can see the water. The pages are engineered for that reader first.

Methods

Sourcing. No date, price, or superlative ships without a primary source or two independent secondary sources. Where sources conflict, we flag the fact and record the disagreement in a public verification register. Anything we cannot resolve does not publish.

Colorization. Any colorized image carries a rust "COLORIZED" badge on the frame. The original monochrome is preserved in the archive and linked from the item page. We colorize to invite, not to deceive.

Voice. Poetic, grounded, reverent. Scholarly honesty throughout. We do not use "delve into," "it's worth noting," "in conclusion," or "game-changer." We do not use exclamation points. If a sentence feels like an advertisement, it gets rewritten.

Accessibility. Every image in a chapter has alternative text — the build refuses to publish a scene without it. Every scroll-driven motion has a static, stacked fallback for readers who set prefers-reduced-motion. Every audio piece will have a transcript.

Consultation and community

The Navesink band of the Lenape lived on this bayshore for thousands of years before the first sail. Chapter 2 of this project is written with, not merely about, the descendant community — Sand Hill Indian families, the Revey family, tribal representatives whose names appear in the credits at publication. No chapter treating pre-contact or contact-era history publishes without that partnership.

The Sandlass family collaboration on Chapter 9 is similarly named and credited. Oral history subjects hold reversion rights to any recording they make with us, and every interview is released under a written agreement that says so.

The project

The Highlands History Project is a program of Above the Hook, an independent media project based in Highlands, New Jersey. We are funded by memberships and by readers who find this work worth paying for. See Support for how to join.

Contact

If a fact on this site is wrong, or a source is missing, or a family member of a person named here would like their story treated differently — write. We will read every message.