In his new book, the historian Russell Shorto offers a thrilling narrative of how New York “came to be.”

In 1664, England decided to invade New Amsterdam, the Dutch colony at the southern end of Manhattan island. The king, Charles II, and his brother, the duke of York, had dreams of a global empire. Their Dutch archrivals stood in the way. But the English strategy changed after Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the invasion, encountered Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colony's leader. Drawing from newly translated material, Taking Manhattan recasts the founding of New York as the result of creative negotiations and the birth of the “first modern city,” blending the advent of capitalism by the Dutch with the rising military power of the English. But it was also the story of brutal dispossession and the roots of-American slavery. Weaving in the neglected histories  of the Indigenous and both free and enslaved Africans, Shorto frames this “paradox” as the reflection of America’s continuing “promise and failure.” Building on the argument in his bestseller Island at the Center of the World, Shorto frames New York’s “creation” in this moment as the foundation on which America later rose as the global “center of capitalism and pluralism.”