Revisiting New Netherland

The essays in this book offer a rich sampling of current scholarship on New Netherland and Dutch colonization in North America. The Introduction explains why the Dutch moment in American history has been overlooked or trivialized and calls attention to signs of the emergence of a new narrative of American beginnings that gives due weight to the imprint of Dutch settlement in America. The essays are organized around six major themes: New Netherland and Historical Memory, New Netherland in the Atlantic World, The Political Economy of New Netherland, New Netherland’s Directors: A New Look, Family Research as a key to New Netherland’s History, and Writing the History of New Netherland in the Twenty-first Century. This volume holds great interest for historians of early America and of Dutch colonization. Contributors include: Willem Frijhoff, Charles Th. Gehring, Joyce D. Goodfriend, Firth Haring Fabend, Jaap Jacobs, Wim Klooster, Harry Macy, Jr., Dennis J. Maika, Simon Middleton, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Annette Stott, David William Voorhees, and Richard Waldron.

This volume investigates the place of Dutch history and Dutch-derived culture in America over the last four centuries. It considers how the Dutch have fared in America, and it explores how American conceptions of Dutchness have developed, from Henry Hudson's historic voyage to Manhattan in 1609 through the rise of Dutch design at the turn of the twenty-first century. Essays probe a rich array of topics: Dutch themes in American arts and letters; the place of Dutch paintings in American collections; shifting American interests in Dutch art, literature, and architecture; the experience of Dutch immigrants in America; and the Dutch Reformed Church in America. "Going Dutch" presents a much needed overview of the Dutch-American experience from its beginnings to the present. Contributors include: Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Willem Frijhoff, Joyce D. Goodfriend, Hans Krabbendam, Joseph Manca, Nancy T. Minty, Mark A. Peterson, Christopher Pierce, Judith Richardson, Louisa Wood Ruby, Benjamin Schmidt, Robert Schoone-Jongen, Annette Stott, Tity de Vries, and Dennis P. Weller.

The Dutch involvement in North America started after Henry Hudson, sailing under a Dutch flag in 1609, traveled up the river that would later bear his name. The Dutch control of the region was short-lived, but had profound effects on the Hudson Valley region. In The Colony of New Netherland, Jaap Jacobs offers a comprehensive history of the Dutch colony on the Hudson from the first trading voyages in the 1610s to 1674, when the Dutch ceded the colony to the English. As Jacobs shows, New Netherland offers a distinctive example of economic colonization and in its social and religious profile represents a noteworthy divergence from the English colonization in North America. Centered around New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan, the colony extended north to present-day Schenectady, New York, east to central Connecticut, and south to the border shared by Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, leaving an indelible imprint on the culture, political geography, and language of the early modern mid-Atlantic region. Dutch colonists' vivid accounts of the land and people of the area shaped European perceptions of this bountiful land; their own activities had a lasting effect on land use and the flora and fauna of New York State, in particular, as well as on relations with the Native people with whom they traded. Sure to become readers' first reference to this crucial phase of American early colonial history, The Colony of New Netherland is a multifaceted and detailed depiction of life in the colony, from exploration and settlement through governance, trade, and agriculture. Jacobs gives a keen sense of the built environment and social relations of the Dutch colonists and closely examines the influence of the church and the social system adapted from that of the Dutch Republic. Although Jacobs focuses his narrative on the realities of quotidian existence in the colony, he considers that way of life in the broader context of the Dutch Atlantic and in comparison to other European settlements in North America.

The Archaeology of New Netherland illuminates the influence of the Dutch empire in North America, assembling evidence from seventeenth-century settlements located in present-day New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Archaeological data from this important early colony has often been overlooked because it lies underneath major urban and industrial regions, and this collection makes a wealth of information widely available for the first time. Contributors to this volume begin by discussing the global context of Dutch colonization and reviewing typical Dutch material culture of the time as seen in ceramics from Amsterdam households. Next, they focus on communities and activities at colonial sites such as forts, trading stations, drinking houses, and farms. The essays examine the agency and impact of Indigenous people and enslaved Africans, particularly women, in the society of New Netherland, and they trace interactions between Dutch settlers and Europeans from other colonies including New Sweden. The volume also features landmark studies of cooking pots, marbles, tobacco pipes, and other artifacts. The research in this volume offers an invitation to investigate New Netherland with the same sustained rigor that archaeologists and historians have shown for English colonialism. The many topics outlined here will serve as starting points for further work on early Dutch expansion in America. Contributors: Craig Lukezic | John P. McCarthy | Charles Gehring | Marijn Stolk | Ian Burrow | Adam Luscier | Matthew Kirk | Michael T. Lucas | Kristina S. Traudt | Marie-Lorraine Pipes | Anne-Marie Cantwell | Diana diZerega Wall | Lu Ann De Cunzo | Wade P. Catts | William B. Liebeknecht | Marshall Joseph Becker | Meta F. Janowitz | Richard G. Schaefer | Paul R. Huey | David A. Furlow

The settlers of New Netherland were obligated to uphold religious toleration as a legal right by the Dutch Republic's founding document, the 1579 Union of Utrecht, which stated that "everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion." For early American historians this statement, unique in the world at its time, lies at the root of American pluralism. New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty offers a new reading of the way tolerance operated in colonial America. Using sources in several languages and looking at laws and ideas as well as their enforcement and resistance, Evan Haefeli shows that, although tolerance as a general principle was respected in the colony, there was a pronounced struggle against it in practice. Crucial to the fate of New Netherland were the changing religious and political dynamics within the English empire. In the end, Haefeli argues, the most crucial factor in laying the groundwork for religious tolerance in colonial America was less what the Dutch did than their loss of the region to the English at a moment when the English were unusually open to religious tolerance. This legacy, often overlooked, turns out to be critical to the history of American religious diversity. By setting Dutch America within its broader imperial context, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty offers a comprehensive and nuanced history of a conflict integral to the histories of the Dutch republic, early America, and religious tolerance.

This volume of essays provides a fresh and innovative look at colonial trade and its impact on economic development in Europe. It is unique in its coverage of countries that are usually ignored, such as Denmark and Sweden, while also including in its chronology more than the 18th century alone.

This book provides an in-depth introduction to the issues involved in the expansion of European interests to the Hudson River Valley, the cultural interaction that took place there, and the colonization of the region. Written in accessible language by leading scholars, these essays incorporate the latest historical insights as they explore the new world in which American Indians and Europeans interacted, the settlement of the Dutch colony that ensued from the exploration of the Hudson River, and the development of imperial and other networks which came to incorporate the Hudson Valley.