Magdalena Dircx’s New Amsterdam:
Speech, Sex, and the Foundations of a City
By Deborah Hamer
There is a curious passage in the correspondence of the directors of the Dutch West India Company and Peter Stuyvesant. Commenting in May 1658 on one Magdalena Dircx, who had been banished from New Amsterdam on Stuyvesant’s orders for her “dissolute life,” the directors wrote she would “not again receive our permission to return to New Netherland.” If she returned through “deceitful practices or under a false name,” the directors authorized Stuyvesant to punish her with a yet harsher sentence than banishment.
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The Gomez Family and Atlantic Patterns in the Development of New York's Jewish Community
By Noah L. Gelfand
On November 1, 1750, Mordecai Gomez, a member of one of North America’s most prominent Jewish mercantile families, died in New York City. According to a notice a few days later in the New-York Gazette, or Weekly Post-Boy, the sixty-two year old Gomez was “esteemed a fair Trader, and charitable to the Poor” who passed away “with an unblemish’d Character;” and who would be “deservedly lamented” by his large family and all his acquaintances.
Read MoreNew York’s Unrighteous Beginnings
By Erin Kramer
In the initial instructions to New Netherland’s director general regarding obtaining land from indigenous peoples, the company leadership wrote: “For trading-goods or by means of some other amicable agreement, induce them to give up ownership and possession to us, without however forcing them thereto in the least or taking possession by craft or fraud, lest we call down the wrath of God upon our unrighteous beginnings, the Company intending in no wise to make war or hostile attacks upon any one.”[1]
When they first ventured into the spaces they would eventually call New Netherland, the Dutch knew that Europe was watching. Because they wanted to set themselves apart from the horrors of bloody conquest and slavery that made up the Black Legend of Spanish colonization, the Dutch were determined to set a better example. Instead of taking land by force, they relied on a legal tradition that acknowledged Native sovereignty over land in the Americas and they deployed capitalism to establish a foothold in North America.
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A Petition to Keep New York under Dutch Rule
By Wim Klooster
In 1664, the residents of New Amsterdam famously gave up their city—without a fight. But there was more resistance to surrendering the Dutch colony of New York in old Amsterdam. A remarkable group of men, nearly all merchants, joined hands in 1667, as the second Anglo-Dutch War was winding down, and petitioned the States General – the Dutch government – to demand restoration of New Netherland. Amazingly, this document and its seventy authors have never been analyzed.
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The Lawyer and the Fox: A Tale of Tricks and Treachery in New Amsterdam
By Jaap Jacobs
Historians of New Netherland have largely viewed Adriaen van der Donck positively, portraying him as a conduit for enlightened Dutch tolerance into North America. But this image of Adriaen van der Donck is hard to reconcile with the historical record. In fact, many aspects of his life point the other way. Van der Donck’s exile from Breda, his marriage to a daughter of a puritan minister from England, and his continuing membership of the Calvinist church suggest that his engagement in colonial projects stemmed from religious motives very like other New England colonists: the desire to create a safe haven overseas, free from persecution. If so, Van der Donck entertained religious ideas quite similar to those of Petrus Stuyvesant.
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Heaven's Wrath: Interview with Danny Noorlander
Interviewed by Deborah Hamer
Today on the blog Gotham editor Deborah Hamer speaks with Danny Noorlander, associate professor at SUNY-Oneonta, about his new book Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, religion in New Amsterdam and the Dutch Republic, and what is on the horizon for his next book.
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Recovering New York’s Entangled Dutch, Native American, and African Histories: An Interview with Jennifer Tosch
By Andrea Mosterman
Many of New York’s Dutch colonists and their descendants relied on the labor of enslaved people. Some historic sites have struggled to address this part of their history and looked for ways in which they can share it with their visitors. For example, an exhibit at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, built in 1699 by Hendrick Claessen Vechte, includes a brief discussion of the home’s enslaved residents. Yet, much of the Dutch history of slavery in New York City and its surroundings is still little known, especially among the general public.
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The Cartographic Cudgel: New York, New England, and Colonial Boundary Disputes
By Nathan Braccio
In many senses, New York (and New Amsterdam/New Netherlands) should be considered the center of cartography in Colonial North America. Starting with the skilled Dutch cartographers, the mapping of New York was more regular and detailed then that of other colonies, including its neighbors in New England. As Patricia Seed has argued, the Dutch believed detailed records legitimized their claim to the region.[1] English colonists in New England did not treat maps the same way. They came from more parochial backgrounds in which maps were novelties and curiosities, not useful tools. However, when New York fell into English hands, a different kind of Englishman arrived there. Its new administrators, such as Governor Edmund Andros, were not parochial English townsmen like their New England neighbors. Like the Dutch, they saw the power of maps and wielded them as powerful weapons. The New York City-based administration of Andros would eventually come to export mapping as a tool and force the colonists of the region to acknowledge their import. Under Andros and other governors sent from England, both New York and New England became visualized through countless property maps and detailed maps of the boundaries between colonies.
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"The Dutch": Bouweries and Early Settlement in New Amsterdam
By Alice Sparberg Alexiou
The settlement was to be called New Amsterdam, and it would serve as headquarters of New Netherland, which stretched from New England to Virginia. The Dutch had claimed the vast territory — a claim the English refused to recognize — after Henry Hudson in 1609 sailed the Half Moon up the river that would bear his name.
From Devil's Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of The Bowery by Alice Sparberg Alexiou, copyright 2018 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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