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Posts in New Amsterdam
Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, by Nicole Saffold Maskiell
Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, by Nicole Saffold Maskiell

Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry

Review by Emily Holloway

Maskiell argues that both social groups – the enslavers and the enslaved – built, maintained, and challenged their respective terms of community and belonging, whether through diplomacy or corporate mergers disguised as marriage arrangements or by sustaining regional networks of contacts to foment rebellion and resistance. The text at times navigates a vast geographic scale, but successfully keeps the narrative grounded in the roots of elite Dutch society in seventeenth century New Netherlands…The overall book project seeks to illuminate the incremental and cumulative changes along with the continuities linking Dutch colonial practices to English colonial institutions in the transition from New Netherlands to New York.

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Reviews, Politics, Race & Ethnicity, Manhattan, Slavery & Antislavery, Business & Labor, New Amsterdam, British EraAndrew LangComment
Sojourner Truth: How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America’s Black Liberation Movement
Sojourner Truth: How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America’s Black Liberation Movement

Sojourner Truth: How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America’s Black Liberation Movement

 By Jerome Dewulf

…[A]ssisting in the recruitment of Black troops for the Union Army… she had an audience with President Lincoln in 1864… in Washington, D.C., Truth challenged the de facto segregation in the city’s transportation system by insisting on her right to take a seat on streetcars. With her decision to use civil disobedience as a strategy to challenge segregation in public transportation, Truth anticipated Rosa Parks by almost a century. However, Truth could also be an uncomfortable voice within her own community. For instance, when Douglass defended the use of violence in the fight for racial justice at a meeting in 1852, she interrupted him with the words “Frederick, is God gone?” and, in 1867, she provocatively stated that “if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs... the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”

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Race & Ethnicity, Antebellum & Civil War, Early Republic, New Amsterdam, Slavery & Antislavery, WomenAndrew LangComment
Dutch-American Stories: On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution
Dutch-American Stories: On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution

Dutch-American Stories: On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution

By Michael Douma

There are a few topics that guarantee a historian an audience. Write a decent biography of Abraham Lincoln or James Madison, for example, and you are bound to have readers. Or, write something new and interesting about the Constitution and you might attract some attention.

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American Revolution, Early Republic, Metropolitan Region, New Amsterdam, Politics, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Before Central Park

Before Central Park

Reviewed by Kara Murphy Schlichting

Before Central Park is Sara Cedar Miller’s fourth publication about New York City’s famous greensward. Miller is historian emerita and, since 1984, a photographer for the Central Park Conservancy. Before Central Park is distinctive in its combination of Miller’s photography, her expert understanding of the park’s geography and archeology, and her meticulous real estate history of parkland from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

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American Revolution, Antebellum & Civil War, Built Environment, Business & Labor, Housing & Realty, Manhattan, Native Americans, Nature & Environment, New Amsterdam, Parks, Poverty & Inequality, Reviews, Urban PlanningGuest User Comment
Dutch-American Stories: The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland

Dutch-American Stories: The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland

By Dennis J. Maika

The first direct shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in 1655. The voyage of the White Horse came in the wake of significant changes in the Dutch Atlantic. In this blog, American historian Dennis Maika outlines how family and business connections shaped the development of a slave-trading center in Manhattan.

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Business & Labor, New Amsterdam, Slavery & Antislavery, TransportationGuest UserComment
“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam
“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam

“Strike for the Prince of Orange!”: La Garce and the Vicarious Privateers of New Amsterdam

By Julie van den Hout

During the mid-1640s, Manhattan played host to the Dutch privateer Willem Albertsen Blauvelt, with his frigate, La Garce (The Wench).[1] From New Amsterdam, New Netherland Director Willem Kieft and his council granted a commission to Captain Blauvelt to intercept Iberian ships in the Caribbean, as “the enemies of the High and Mighty Lords of the States General of the United Netherlands.”[2] Blauvelt made at least three privateering voyages from New Amsterdam to the Caribbean with La Garce and captured at least seven Spanish ships as “prizes.” With each voyage, more and more local investors signed on to help finance the expeditions in return for a fairly unique commodity — a share in a Spanish prize ship and its cargo.

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Business & Labor, New Amsterdam, Waterfront & Islands, TransportationGuest UserComment
Dutch-American Stories: Mass Murder on Manhattan

Dutch-American Stories: Mass Murder on Manhattan

By Mark Meuwese

Settler colonialism is not a story of friendly relations throughout. The confrontation with an unfamiliar other creates wariness and suspicion and often leads to violent outbursts in which noncombatants become innocent victims. Manhattan in the seventeenth century was no exception, as the events of 1643 show.

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Manhattan, Native Americans, New Amsterdam, Race & EthnicityGuest UserComment
Being Black in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam vs. New Amsterdam

Being Black in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam vs. New Amsterdam

By Jeroen Dewulf

Due to a paucity of original sources, many questions regarding the social and religious behavior of New Amsterdam’s Black population have remained unanswered. One way of approaching the existing scholarship with new insights is by using a comparative methodology. Naturally, the observation that similarities in behavior existed in more than one place does not automatically imply that the origin and historical development of one corresponds to that of the other. However, since it is unlikely that many new sources about Manhattan’s earliest Black inhabitants will still be uncovered in the coming decades, a comparative perspective is probably the best strategy to shed new light on this historically marginalized community.

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New Amsterdam, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, Slavery & AntislaveryGuest User Comments
Dutch-American Stories: The “Patron Saint of New York”

Dutch-American Stories: The “Patron Saint of New York”

By Jaap Jacobs

The bonds that connect the American and Dutch peoples have been commemorated in various ways and at various levels. Dutch-American Friendship Day is a well-established annual event at the governmental level. In New York City, the historical memory of Petrus Stuyvesant has recently become controversial, but in the twentieth century his image was iconic.

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New AmsterdamGuest UserComment