A fascinating account of the Dutch colony that began the settlement of Manhattan. Amazingly detailed research and written with real enthusiasm and occasional poetry. ( )

Terrific. This is everything popular history should be. ( )

Interesting history of the Dutch colony on Manhattan, particularly for readers who live in Manhattan and the surrounding area. Very readable and enjoyable book. ( )

Mediocre. Good introduction to New Amsterdam, but the author has an serious bias against New England. It's obvious enough that it detracts from the books overall quality. If I want a rant about how much Boston sucks as compared to New York, I'll deliver it myself thank you very much. ( )

History of Dutch Manhattan with a focus on the people involved as well as the impact of its culture on the American culture. Well written and interesting not to mention well documented. ( )

Breathtaking immersion in what might have been and almost was. Shorto takes us into the past and shows us treasure missed by generations of historians. I'm in love with Adriaen van der Donck. He should have had monuments. 17th Century Manhattan is a microcosm of world views in conflict with power at stake, mistakes made and greatness grasped at. It is a cruel irony van der Donck was killed as a side effect of the very mismanagement he strode so hard and brilliantly to surplace with something much more modern. ( )

Fascinating story, and a well-researched book--but dragged down by uneven writing and a repetitive cheerleading for the Dutch--at times the writing betrays a certain lack of respect for the audience, as if the author thinks he must spell everything out for the reader, and then repeat it three or more times...

The writing is also marred by the use (abuse, really) of phrases such as "he must've been...", "he must have thought...", "he must have wanted...", and their like. Shorto uses these in an awkward attempt to enter the inner lives of some of the central historical characters he presents -- but the problem with this approach, of course, is that there's no way for us (or Shorto) to know what any of these individuals were really thinking or feeling at the time. Shorto would have done better to stick to relating the "facts" of the story, which are dramatic enough in their own right (not to mention highly disputed in some cases). His repeated attempts to portray the thoughts and feelings of his main characters has the weird effect of appearing to fictionalize them, ultimately detracting from the sense of the historical reality of these persons--rather the opposite of bringing history to life. Seems Shorto couldn't decide if he was writing history or historical fiction, and the result is somewhat irritating for the reader interested in history.

Despite these flaws, though, an informative and sometimes surprising look at a crucial period in the history of an important city (New Amsterdam/New York) and the development of what would become the United States. ( )

A very engaging book about an era of American history that is rarely acknowledged and not well understood when it is. Shorto relies on recent scholarship and translation of contemporary sources from Europe and the New Netherlands colonies. The biggest revelation of the book is the story of Adriaen van der Donck, who opposed the somewhat dictatorial rule of Peter Stuyvesant by attempting to establish the rule of Dutch law in the Dutch colonies. One wonders whether the Founders were aware of van der Donck. ( )

It ain't much if it ain't Dutch.

I suppose this explains why I felt immediately at home when I moved to the Netherlands almost 20 years ago.

I found the Catholic and Protestant arguments fascinating- as well as the Monarchists vs Republics viewpoints.

The idea of a Dutch contribution to American history seems novel at first, but that is because early American history was written by Englishmen,

The Indians were as skilled, as duplicitous, as capable of theological rumination and technological cunning, as smart and as pig headed, and as curious and as cruel as the Europeans who met them.

On the difference between mainstream parenting elsewhere in the world and in the low countries in the 17th century;

The Dutch thinking was the opposite; they hugged and coddled their children, ignoring the scorn of outsiders and following their own experts.

He shows at least that some of the Dutch colonists were aware of the nuances in the Indians' understanding of property rights, noting that to the natives "wind, stream, bush, field, sea, beach, and riverside are open and free to everyone of every nation with which the Indians are not embroiled in open conflict."

In the early 1640’s, however, one of those epochal changes of thinking began to occur in the minds of men from different nations and traditions. The new mind-set had its intellectual origins, most notably, in the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, the man who was the guiding light to Adriaen van der Donck and other law students of the era. Twenty years before, Grotius had put forth the idiosyncratic proposition that peace was the natural state of mature, civilized nations, an war ought to be considered only as a last resort, and even then should only be governed by rules to which all parties subscribed.

Even the Dutch vs English notion of 'who gets what' on discovering new land differs and opens ownership up to conflict.

Stuyvesant despised Jews, loathed Catholics, recoiled at Quakers, and reserved a special hatred for Lutherans. Which is to say, he was the very model of a well-bred mid-seventeenth-century European.

I find this totally repugnant;

Out of the Puritans' exceptionalism--their belief that the Old World had succumbed to wickedness and they had been charged by God to save humanity by founding a new society was similarly divinely anointed. In 1845, journalist John O'Sullivan coined the phrase that would carry this doctrine forward across the continent when he declared "the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government."

What matters about the Dutch colony is that it set Manhattan on course as a place of openness and free trade. A new kind of spirit hovered over the island, something utterly alien to New England and Virginia, which is directly traceable to the tolerance debates in Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to the intellectual world of Descartes, Grotius, and Spinoza.

This was just laughable (regarding that the Dutch hadn't made important contributions to America);

...he found it particularly ludicrous that so great and powerful a country as the United States could have gotten where it had by "following the example of the policy of the petty cheese-paring of the Batavian provinces, with their windmills, and barren soil, fit only for fuel..." ( )

I loved this book, principally because I learned a great deal. I had no idea that Dutch Manhattan was such a vibrant place before the British took it over. The Dutch West India Company and Peter Stuyvesant managed the entire colony as a business interest, a private corporate land holding, denying settlers civil rights. He refused to relinquish his or the Company's dictatorial powers and pursued policies counter to the interests of the colonists. As a result, when British war ships entered the harbour in 1664 during the third Anglo-Dutch war and offered the people of New Netherlands civil government if they surrendered, the entire militia laid down their arms without firing a shot. That is worth thinking about. ( )

Shorto's book on the Dutch founding of New Amsterdam adds an important dimension to our understanding of early American history. A fascinating detailed story including power struggles, interplay between New Amsterdam and the home country, Director-General Peter Stuyvesant versus Adriaen van der Donck, and the mostly peaceful interactions with the Indians. His thorough treatment of the omnipresent interactions between the tribes and the settlers is anything but simplistic.

While interesting, Shorto's desire to place the Dutch at the center of American origins is overdone. Shorto is a journalist not an historian and it shows when he tries to directly connect New Amsterdam's diversity with today's ethnic and cultural pluralism. Fortunately, Shorto's book is good enough to easily overcome the distraction of that thesis.

Shorto also provides a lesson in the 'history of history' when he describes a circular process whereby this chapter has been overlooked because the raw materials had never been accurately translated until the 1970's and the materials were never sought because of the Anglocentric view of American history. These materials now allow the telling of a much fuller history of Dutch America.

All in all, a very worthy addition to your collection of American history and an enjoyable read. Highly recommended. ( )

http://www.dutchgenealogy.nl/index.ph... ( )

http://www.skyseastone.net/jvstin/unj... ( )

Fascinating account of a little known period and people in American history. The influences of the Dutch settlers of Manhattan on American culture have been little recognized, and this well-written, fast-paced and informative book should correct this oversight! ( )

http://www.slywy.com/bookreviews/manh... ( )

This was the March 2007 book for my Library book group. I find that the older I get the greater appreciation I have for history and this book covers a very interesting part of US history that had not had the attention it deserves.

The American history I was taught started with the Pilgrims and then fast forwarded to the Revolution. The implication was that there was nothing else of interest.

This book starts in the 1620's covering the early colonial history with a focus on the Dutch settlement on what is now New York City. It is apparent that this colony had a dramatic effect on the personality of the English colony that followed and on the Democracy that was established to replace it.

Given my personal interest in history and the fascinating era this book covers I had high expectations that were not met. The author has a round about writing style that I found difficult to follow. He tends to skip around in time and geography following a thread that I was unable to see. When introducing one of the most influential characters it took two pages to get to revealing his name.

I found this book so difficult and frustrating I only made it half way through. Of the dozen people in the book group only two finished the book.

If you persevere you can learn quite a bit from this book, I just found that I did not have the energy to expend. ( )

Bet you didn't know that everything good about American culture (religious tolerance, multi-culturalism, front stoops and cookies) came to use from the Dutch by way of New Amsterdam. Well, now you do.

Quibbles for the weasally language (he must have seen...) for the details that there's no evidence for, and for the suspicion that he started with his premise and then looked for evidence to support it. A good writing style. ( )

http://steelbrassnwood.livejournal.co... ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/310112.html

This is, quite simply, a fantastic book.

It is essentially a micro-study of a small European country's colony on an island off the North American coast, between its foundation in the 1620s and the moment when the British captured it forty years later. The author has gone through the surviving records, combined them with everything else available to him about the period, and come up with a cracking good yarn. He also argues (quite convincingly) that the specific cultural influence of the colony's founders had a fundamental and decisive influence on North American and therefore on world politics.

A strong claim. But consider the unintended consequences of the colony's newly created municipal council's concern about a potential attack from the English in 1653. They built a defensive wall along the northern edge of the town. Shorto notes:

In the long term, what is notable about this first public works project orchestrated by the town government is not the wall itself but the street that ran along it. It's a safe bet that no matter how wildly they tended to dream, the magistrates could not have imagined that this rough pathway would replace the gleaming, colonnaded bourse of Amsterdam as the centre of world finance.

For this is the story of New Amsterdam, the centre of the Dutch settlement on the east coast of America.

Shorto follows the careers of the main figures of the Dutch colony, Peter Minuit, who probably made the famous transaction of 60 guilders with the Indians as part of a plan to move the main settlement from what is now Governor's Island to the larger island across the bay; Peter Stuyvesant, its governor for seventeen years; and Stuyvesant's rival, Adriaen van der Donck, the colony's first chronicler, hitherto forgotten by history, eventually meeting an obscure fate, the "jonkheer" commemorated in the name of Yonkers.

But he also follows the ordinary people - for instance, Catalina Trico and Joris Rapalje, teenagers hastily married in Amsterdam in early 1624 just before emigrating, who pop up again and again as minor characters in the story. He does his best to get into the mind-set of the Indians, who must have assumed that they were really in control right up to the end of this period. "The early seventeenth century was a much more interesting time than the Wild West era, a time when Indians and Europeans were soemthing like equal participants in a joint habitation of the land, dealing with one another as allies, competitors, partners."

And most particularly, he makes the argument that the Dutch national commitment to toleration and diversity played out in New Amsterdam in making it a cosmopolitan society from the very beginning, where as early as 1646 the four hundred inhabitants spoke eighteen languages between them, and that the town's location at the centre of the main land passage from the coast to the interior of the continent inevitably meant that its values would be transmitted more readily to future settlers than would the ethos of Puritan New England to the north or the plantation owners to the south, something that only the forgotten van der Donck appears to have foreseen.

It is topped and tailed neatly: topped by a fascinating introductory chapter on Henry Hudson, who led the Dutch-funded expedition that first charted the islands in 1609 and the river that bears his name, the year before his crew mutinied and marooned him and his son in a small boat in the bay much further north that also bears his name and contains his unmarked resting place; and tailed by a brief account of the years after the first surrender to the British and the renaming of the colony after the future English king who had masterminded the campaign, the Duke of York. Shorto notes that in order to maintain the value of their new asset, the British had to preserve the unique cultural character of the city.

Nice little throwaway anecdotes as well, such as this observation about a monarch who Just Did Not Get It:

Of course he believed in freedom for his subjects, [King Charles I] famously explained, "but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having government... It is not their having a share in government, that is nothing appertaining to them." (He gave this explanation to the crowd gathered to watch his beheading.)

Or on an early Dutch negotiator with the Indians, who

was given a house, presents and thick portions of bear meat. Although he doesn't mention it, he may have been given other things as well, for the detailed list of Mohawk vocabulary he compiled includes the words for "man", "woman", "prostitute", "vagina", "phallus", "testicles", "to have intercourse", "very beautiful", "When shall you return?" and "I do not know."

And staying with the linguistic theme, it's obvious, once Shorto points it out, that the island at the entrance to the bay was named after the Dutch parliament, the States-General, or Staten for short. That the Dutch koekje became the generic term for baked confectionery when it became a "cookie". That the Dutch colonists' cabbage salad, or kool sla, shifted its spelling more than its pronunciation to become "coleslaw". That the Dutch managerial relationship with the baas, though slightly re-nuanced in meaning and sound by colonial circumstances, became the American concept of the "boss". He also makes out a reasonable case for lingering Dutch influence in the origins of Santa Claus, the office of district attorney, and indeed the Bill of Rights.

There are one or two slips. I bristled a bit at Shorto's use of the phrase "English Civil War", which by his own account started in Scotland, and which had a significant Irish dimension here completely unreported. He also has Samuel Pepys buying a beaver hat in 1641, when the future diarist was in fact only eight years old. The IJ is technically the river at Amsterdam, not the bay (formerly the Zuiderzee, now the IJsselmeer). But these are minor quibbles.

As I said above, this is a fantastic book. Strongly recommended. ( )