Best of the 03.01.10 Issue: From the Raritan to the Ramapough

Jonathan Taylor writes:

My pick of the March 1 issue is the March 1 issue, just for provoking a Pick of the Issue post. Larissa MacFarquhar’s Profile of Paul Krugman is eye-catching, prima facie, though I’d like to see a piece looking more broadly at the world of economics blogging that Krugman is now engaged with via his Times blog. That could bring us full circle, via Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, to the subject of the issue of Calvin Trillin’s (gated) piece, peripatetic Sichuanese chef Peter Chang: This culinary legend of the U.S. Southeast is a central figure in Cowen’s extenstive Ethnic Dining Guide. (Note to Tyler, put Famous Sichuan on Pell Street, and Grand Sichuan House of Bay Ridge on your New York City to-do list.)
My real pick is Ben McGrath’s “Strangers on the Mountain” (also not free online), the mountain being about 50 miles north of Krugman’s Princeton, in the Ramapo range (which Chang might still try if he really wants to disappear). Just when you think the piece is rather drearily going to be about a conflict between libertarian A.T.V. (and computer) users and the gummint (New Jersey park police), it takes the first in a series of sociological and historical turns that grabbed me over and over. McGrath points out that the so-called Jackson Whites—a.k.a. Ramapo Mountain People, or the Ramapough Lenape Nation—were the subject of some dubious reporting by The New Yorker in 1938, as well as by the Times and others since the 19th century.
Old treatments of the topic by the NAACP magazine The Crisis in 1939, and the Southern Workman, journal of an “industrial school for Negro youth,” in 1911, among others, can be found through Google Books.