author
Julia Keese Colles
1840–1913
A lively local historian and lecturer, she helped preserve the literary and civic history of New Jersey at a time when women were expanding their public role in scholarship. Her work on Morristown and Newark gathered writers, places, and stories that might otherwise have been forgotten.
1 Audiobook
Authors and Writers Associated with Morristown With a Chapter on Historic Morristown
by Julia Keese Colles
About the author
Born in New Orleans in 1840, Julia Keese Nelson Colles became an American historian, lecturer, and writer with strong ties to New Jersey. She studied at the Abbott Collegiate Institute in New York City and later taught as chair of social science at Rutgers Female College.
Colles is best remembered for her work documenting literary and local history, especially in Authors and Writers Associated with Morristown (1893). She also prepared writing on Newark authors and spent years collecting material on the people and culture of her region, giving her work a lasting value for readers interested in how communities remember themselves.
She was also active in public history organizations, helping found the women’s branch of the New Jersey Historical Society. Colles died in 1913, but her books, lectures, and papers still offer a window into the intellectual life of New Jersey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.