fire. so jill's one of my best friends, and she lives with my wife and me. and i'm going to do a book about jill. so that's just that's coming from my heart. these people. so. and then i don't know i'll come back here in ten years and maybe i'll take ideas you got ideas or you can let me the ideas. thank you. this guy, i love this. okay, well, maybe i think we should end that. okay. thank you, everybody. youtaking manhattan the extraordinary events that created new york and shaped america takes a look at the real of our nation's most populous city. the good, the bad and the downright ugly, including the dispossession of the digits, population and, the importing of

enslaved people going all the back to 1600s. fareed zakaria in this fascinating book, russell unravels the dna dna inside new york. i thought i knew new york, but it opened my eyes to the city and rich history. and since the book also talks about capitalism, here's a fun fact if you've ever in new york city and been to the trinity church graveyard, former treasury secretary, subpar jeweler alexander hamilton is buried there and writer the street is this shoe store that says probably the best prices in new york city. russell shorto, who received a dutch knighthood 2009, has authored eight books and resides in the greatest state of the union right here, cumberland, maryland.

right. round of applause for cumberland. mr. shortall will be interviewed by paula whitacre. she's a writer and editor who, lives in alexandria. an okay state but. we do our best. nobody's perfect. her first book, a civil in an uncivil time, is a biography about a new york abolitionist named wilber, who worked in alexandria, virginia, during civil war and in washington during reconstruction. in early april, she completed a manuscript for a book titled alexandria on edge, which is about alexandria during the civil war and reconstruction. it is under contract with georgetown university press and is with expected publication date in 2026. let's have a round of applause. so this is great.

got the book i loved book. i can't wait to talk to you about book. what i'm going to do today is ask a few questions. just kind about the content. talk about the impact of the events that you describe. and then just a little bit about your research and writing process. then we're going to open it up to questions. the audience. sure. wow. and and the spirit. i think there are a couple of seats up here in front of me will be with us. but you don't want to commit. that's okay. so scott gave a little bit of an introduction, but just to kind of ground everybody before, we start, you know, just kind of the speech of kind of what and when does the main focus of your take place? yeah, it's called taking manhattan. and i wrote a book that came out in 2000 for about it called the island at the center of the world. i'm going to keep about about the same island, manhattan. and that book really told the story of the dutch founding of a colony, new netherland, which

was extensive. it encompassed all or parts of new york, new jersey, some of maryland, pennsylvania, connecticut and the capital new amsterdam was at the tip of manhattan island. so that told the story of this 40 year history. ending the english, taking it over and it new york and in i wrote that book working a man named charles gering and a woman named johnny feinerman who charlie gehring started in 1974, translating official archives of the colony of new netherland from the state library in albany and. johnny joined him ten years later. charlie retired in april and after 51 years. there's still left to go. but this 12,000 pages of material and i just was immersed in that world and worked with them and and based the book

largely on that. that archive of material i stayed connected to them and to that work ever since. and starting several years ago, i realized they had moved up to the last couple of years in the life of the colony and i realized in looking at those translations that we now are seeing new amsterdam at its height as this very i mean it kind of looked like a wild west town but with dutch features, you know, the buildings had gables and they had a windmill and things like that. but but it was it there were about 1500 people at the end. they spoke all kinds of language. they were all over the place of the year at the is 1664. so by the end, those last couple of years, it's this very little port city. and everybody has trader there and they are trading some of them are trading with islands of

the caribbean, with curacao, some with south america, some with different parts of europe. so are in this latin these translations there's more recent translations. i realized we're now seeing this very vibrant little community on manhattan island at its and we're seeing it the way the english saw it when they are belatedly. oh, we really want that because they have colonies in new england to north and they've got virginia and maryland settlements. but there's this whole piece in the middle. so that's that so i decided what if i wrote a book zeroing in on this two week period in late summer of 1664, which by the way, the last book the 40 years of history you're writing of a saga, whereas this more follows when aristotle talked about drama. he said ideally you want to have a set group of characters, set

time, a set place, and this is that it's two weeks. it's the english are in there, ships in the harbor. the dutch are in fort on the tip of the island. they're their cannons at one another. you know it's a story. so that's what it is. but one thing that you also do, though, is you go back to europe to kind of get where we were in those two weeks. and, you know, i'm sort of interested. so, richard nichols, your british kind of protagonist and there's him in peter stuyvesant. yeah. and i mean, just kind of what was the role these two personalities in you know kind of the resolution of the two week period? yeah. i'm not looking at a phone call. i'm i just realized i always like to take a picture of groups. and because you look so good, but i won't use it for commercial purposes, i promise. so, as i said, i like, i'm a as a writer of narrative history, i believe in storytelling in that that means conflict to people or to sides. but once you've got that, then

you back up. and as you say, i can go to europe. who were these english? who were the dutch? what were the issues at stake? so in the book, i do that, all of that. but also focusing it on these two men, these two leaders, really on the dutch. it's not just stuyvesant. it stuyvesant. it's this whole community, 1500 people, because they all it was really democracy in action. they their lives there, their livelihoods, everything was the line here. so they were all making their heard. richard nichols start peter, everybody has heard of peter stuyvesant. whether they know much about him or not. richard nichols i love as a character to write about because he's very concerned and nobody who had how many people here had heard of richard nichols is och you're you the press. so and so he wins this this face

off. he names the place new york. defines the geographic features of new york. and much else. and nobody's ever heard of him. so that was exciting. so i research his background, which hadn't really been and i was i realized could use him to to really tell this. the english side of the story. what is going on in england throughout this whole really throughout the whole 17th century. and then peter stuyvesant, the leader of the dutch colony, very consequential. also, he ran it for the last 17 years. he believed that he made it this center of what would call capitalism. and i think there's there's a good case to be made for that. and so and the interesting thing one interesting thing is that nichols represented faction of english society who are kind of

misleadingly labeled the royalists. misleading because yes the civil war many of them supported i mean they, supported the monarchy, but not necessarily they were lovers of monarchy, although many of them probably were, but because they were anti that was the other side. and the puritans wanted to take over and and make all of society and government conform to their will and and outlaw and dancing and and they then did that once they took. but but the royalists were relative. they were believers in religious toleration, which was unusual at the time. they were pragmatists. they were business people. so were the dutch. so, hap, what starts to happen in this showdown is and this, you know, it away here, it ends up not being a fight even though they're several times over this the course of the standoff there are one side or the other is about unleash the dogs war, but

rather ultimate. they come to recognize that they have quite a bit in common and that at least for the people on the not necessarily for the home country, this this would be better than any other outcome to to to join forces to merge. as i say, i call it a merger. i also say that they're kind of inventing a new city which has the features of dutch ness in it. oh, that was exciting lloyd or something, which has the preserves the dutch element, but ties it to the rising empire. so there's this taking which is almost not as i when i say one sided, i guess as the first taking which you about of the native americans. and i wonder if you could just kind of first of all, yale school us in what we learned at school about the $24 purchase of manhattan even just the name how

the word manhattan came to be. yeah as you say, the book is called taking manhattan and mainly focused on this dutch english showdown. but i spend a good amount of time in the book on the taking, which took place in 1626. the dutch came in 1624. they were meticulous about keeping records, hence the 12,000 pages of records of the colony and they got they they signed something like 600 deeds with native people all up and down hudson river and elsewhere. the first was for manhattan island, the most infamous which, from our perspective, is certainly a swindle from the perspective of the people on the ground. it's more complicated. first of all, that the $24 figure that you cited that was a 19th century transit later converting the value of 60 guilders which is what we are

told into then but i can talk for an hour about this but i won't but but but the important things to know it was not a purchase price. the dutch knew perfectly well the native people did not have a concept of real estate as something you could transact over. they knew to the native people this was an alliance of sorts. this a trading alliance and they would get they valued out of it. european manufactured goods and they would allow dutch to live in the colony or on the island and they would stay around too. and they were a presence throughout and that was the notion. and the dutch needed that the european real transaction because they wanted a piece of paper to show to other especially the english also to the french whoever to say this was ours. we got it fair and square they

the english that the native understanding, however, a few years go by, the balance of power starts to shift in favor of the europeans and they start to conveniently forget that and they start to push the native out which and they kept pushing, as did the english in new england. that's, you know, in a way, the story of american history right now. so i was telling you before that i was actually in new york past week and i was up on the 35th floor on the east side looking out at where the east and harlem rivers meet. and, you know, you really just see the water and though you could also see laguardia airport, i mean, you could start to imagine so i just one of the things i loved about your book was just how you describe the landscape and. i wonder if you could just talk a little bit about you. what what the first dutch what they and the natives, for that matter, like what was the landscape that they saw? yeah, well, it's good that you mention natives there too. the interesting about that

region and manhattan island particular is it was kind of a world trade center before europeans came. the lenape or muncie or delaware are the name for the people whose territory. the greater new york city area was, but it was manhattan island was also used seasonally by the shinnecock the montauk people. others from the region. so it was it was a kind of crossroads before the dutch when they built their global trading empire, they they were seafaring people. they looked at everything terms of water and to them and the english only understood this much later. if you ultimately if you were ultimately to get access to this continent, you know, this huge virgin continent of america, you had to have water as your highways. there's other way in. so they knew very early from the native people that you've got manhattan island sitting this

world class harbor, we should have a map and then you follow that follow the hudson river north and then 150 miles north of the harbor you come to the confluence of the hudson and the mohawk and the mohawk goes west all the way to the great lakes. so knew i mean there's this is an ultimate aim of ours. it was finally realized the 1820s when the erie canal was completed. and and that finally opened. the mohawk made it navigable all the way to the great lakes and from that moment, all the cities around the great lakes, duluth and chicago and detroit and erie spring into being the cities at the confluence troy and schenectady and albany do likewise. and that's really the moment when new york city takes off as this this fulcrum between, all the world's goods and for that matter, and the interior of the american continent.

so in the 1620s already the dutch had a sense of that they were thinking ahead to as the ultimate way to to develop america. so you know, words you think really had had these two weeks, maybe not have taken place. they really had much more kind of continental designs. were there were people in the colony mean you know and you see this in the letters that they wrote home especially to the west india company the dutch west indian company, the kind of overlord of the colony and they were never giving this colony the attention that it deserved. so you see the leaders of, the colony continually writing to them, saying, look, we've got we set aside this continent can exploit it. we've got this very interesting mix of the dutch at this time. i didn't mention were pioneers in religious toleration and so they had this you at 1.18

languages being spoken in new amsterdam and pioneering what we would call capitalism. we've got this interesting mix of elements, got this vibrant little community we want support, but they weren't getting it. so we know that from the from the letters they were writing and. so through those letters, we know they were saying, look, here's we want to do ultimately. and they were never given the support, which is one reason they said, all right, we'll kind of go into business with the english, right? yeah. interesting. so an illustration, too, of what was going on with africans. i mean, you at one point you said something like, i'm going to quote you to you and probably like that. but anyway, nicholas boat was called the guinea, an homage to grim successes on the so-called guinea coast of west signals that we are already knee deep in moral compromise. so maybe just talk a little bit about the role of slavery and the slave trade by the dutch. and yeah, yeah, the slavery starts. it was new.

netherland was not started with slavery in mind. it was started to do business with the native people furs, which they did it. new amsterdam begins in 1626. a year later. the first african enslaved africans arrived not part of this purposeful let's bring slaves in to develop, but the dutch were fighting a war or a really war of independence against throughout much of their history. and they, a dutch ship had captured a portuguese in the caribbean which was allied the spanish and it had enslave africans on it. and they took them. they had heard about this new settlement in what, on manhattan. so they brought them there and kind of left them there. 22 people. so that's the first. and for most of the life of the colony slavery is this ad hoc thing. they kind of come on ships that were that had other business

until the very end. in 1659, after the west indies company tried and tried to make a profit furs and this and that and failed. finally say to peter stuyvesant, we want you to experiment with a consignment of --. that was the phrase. and so he starts the ball rolling and it took a long time to develop, but he got a shipment of 290 men, women, children from west africa into the harbor, and they two weeks before richard nichols and the english did so, it was almost at very end of the colony's life that. it really here's this is going to take off. so once richard nichols takes over after this, you know, you read the book and you that's the whole of this struggle between them. but once he takes over, he's got all the he's got like kind of

the ingredients enslaving industry and it begins mean it begins slowly under the english and then really by about 1700, it's about another 30 years, years or so before it gets to the point they enact the first slave code. so they are institutionalizing it, passing, you know, no more than three blacks can congregate together and you know, things like that. yeah. you talking your subtitle says the events that created new york and shaped america so that your bold claim. so how did all this shape america. well very simply because new york became what it did it had a huge influence on america. i'm talking about the dutch having brought these basic ingredients, pluralism, which had religious toleration underneath it. so this mixed community and the dutch had in europe what we

would call capitalism. they were their main enterprises were very hazardous. you were sending halfway around the world. how are you going to i mean, that's a very low likelihood of success. great likelihood of disaster. so how do you spread risk around? so they developed this concept of stock shares of stock, different people buy a piece of the action. so those two things then take root in. new amsterdam, the english take over, name it new york. then you jump ahead a couple of centuries to the 19th century. and this is when the waves of europeans come to america. most of them sail into new york harbor and they land in manhattan and they see these skyscrapers going up or know semis and they see all these people speaking different languages and worshiping different faiths and struggling to get ahead by what we would call upward mobility.

and they say this is america but it wasn't america, it was new york and it was new york because it had been amsterdam. so maybe they stayed maybe they stayed for a generation, but their they or their children or their grandchildren move west, go to new jersey, they go to they go all the way west and they bring that some of those notions with them. that's yeah, that's the broad of how these how these ideas spread. the other thing i thought, i mean, i was not that aware of, i thought was very interesting, you know, just the the new england really within the british and you kind of talked about it back in england as well. but, you know, the massachusetts colony and i'm actually from connecticut. i will shout out to john winthrop, who's also in there. but, you know, between the puritans and these more pragmatic and even that it was kind of as you point out was kind of a point counterpoint, you know, even today. yeah. one of another broad influence. richard nichols had two missions

so nichols to pick up where we were little bit ago the there had been a civil war. the puritans power, they captured the king charles the first they beheaded him his two young sons the flee to the continent to exile eventually they come back oliver cromwell the puritan leader dies. they come back. the throne. they have done their family has done battle as have much of england with puritans for a long time. they're back the throne now and they charles the and his younger brother james duke of york and new york and they they wanted to start building an empire dutch have have the jump on them so they look across atlantic and they see this dutch colony as i was saying they want to take it they don't know how they get this guy, richard nichols, who

they'd known all their lives. but they have a second problem in america, and that is new england, which was english, but it had been founded by the puritans decades and from their base in boston they had built power and they loathed the stuart kings. they are the ones puritans came into being to purify the church of england. they detested the church of england, the kings of england by law were the heads of the church of england. so there's this built in antipathy so they have now the royalists the stuart kings are back on the throne. they have one. but the puritans in new england have not gotten that message. i mean, they know that it happened, but they're far enough away that they are just going about their own business, doing what they want. so the charles and james say to richard nichols, you have two missions. one is figure out how to take this colony from the dutch and

to deal those puritans in new england make them obey us. so nichols had these two missions and mission number one, he solved in this very interesting way and i believe it was really him and stuyvesant together with the small groups of people around them in this two week period who did in this really ingenious way. and of course couldn't phone home. he couldn't text home and say, you know what i'm thinking of creating a kind of merger here. i'm going to give all these things. so he just created it on the ground and in this very interesting way, created in new york. so he's succeeded at that first mission. he failed utterly at the mission, which was to deal with the puritans. he went there, he brought commissioners and they just said, screw you, not, you know, we don't care about the king and we're far enough away. and so that then sets up two ideals logical bases in the american colonies.

now we're in the 13 original colleagues. one is new york, and that's relatively pragmatic globally business like tolerant, relative, the one in new england is literally puritanical, theocratic it's got this america first notion god us a right to this continent. we can take over the whole continent from the native people. we can spread our will around, the world. i mean, so each of these is an ideology that has been part america forever. and they've been at war with each other forever. and i, you know, going off script here. but i kind of think the country has succeeded when. it has found a way to make them work together. and it has started to go off the rails when one or the other gets so strong that it tries to make other extinct. right now. you've also had a book published, i think in england and the netherlands itself.

so maybe just a little bit about the reaction of readers in those countries. yeah. yeah it's been this book is published in england in the netherlands. it's gotten good attention. i don't know what to say. it's the english, you know, it was years ago i wrote ireland the center of the world, that i first. it did not occur to me when i was writing that book that it would be published in dutch and that i would be teaching dutch history to dutch people. i would have like frozen, but so i've gotten used to that. and so i'm my are pretty well known there. and that's that's a really interesting thing to have, you know, to be, to be kind of a conduit for for this history has been forgotten in book was published in england too. but maybe not surprisingly because the dutch have the the the higher hand there it didn't do well but this book is doing

pretty well in england and it's getting a lot of nice attention so that's that's gratifying to see and. you know, there's an interesting twist on all of this history which is that so english you could say one they took the colony from the dutch. that's in 1664. but then in. 1688 you have the glory so-called, glorious revolution, which english history has spun as a an inverted version that the james the duke of york from new york was named becomes king james and he's a catholic and the english don't want a catholic king so they invite the dutch nobleman or stockholder, willem to become their king. it was an invasion. there were 40,000 dutch troops invaded, england, but english, you know, likes to say, no, we've never been invaded. so we have been invaded. so we invited him so the spin doctor, he goes way back. so, you know the irony then

here's the nice twist is that james the same james takes york and it and nicholas names it after him and then he is dethroned by the dutch and they come in not only taking the monarchy. but they bring dutch ness throughout england. so the rise of the english empire begins i think then because then bring the dutch, have the interest for for building an empire, especially the financial infrastructure. so bank of england begins then on the on the principles that underlay dutch banking. so it's a really big counter to the taking of new york is that what kind of british east india company and all that it. well yeah well that that that that starts earlier. it's the beginning of the bank of england. yeah so going to you wrote the first book about particular topic about 20 years ago. and i, you know, i part of it

was that you know more documents were translated which was what else you know what led you like what changed in those 20 years in terms of, you know, how you even approach the whole topic? yeah, well i think that we society has a lot in 20 years and i have along it and i when i was going to revisit it this material now in this book, i really, i mean to me now slavery front and center, the dispossession of native peoples are front and center in a way that i mean i deal with those topics in ireland at the center of the world but it's much more i just you know it had to be an integral part of the story now so that's just seemed obvious to me because i've, you know and it was right there in the records, you know, whenever you see it, you know, you can react to it. yeah. so one of the things i was wondering about was, you know so these, these were like in kind

of dutch, like they were dutch, but kind of of more antiquated, you know, language and whatever. but, you know, just talk about how you're able to use that because you so you're so good about crafting a story for folks i ever read this year. i mean, you really feel like you're right in these scenes and, you know, they're all true because is nonfiction and just how you're able to really place yourself into some those scenes was just great you so i write nonfiction you say so things are footnoted and bibliography but i write i'm a storyteller and i believe that story telling is true and legitimate way of doing history. it's not the only way. and it's the oldest way. i mean, people used to sit around the fire and tell about the past and so i try to do both. and i so again, i have this huge

corpus of translations and i'm working not from the originals, although there are times when there's something hasn't been translated yet and i know this, it's interesting, but i don't trust my own 17th century dutch. i go to one of the translators and say, can you translate this document for me. so i work from those materials. the english side, especially about richard, the main materials were at the bodleian library at oxford and at the uk archives. so you've got all that stuff and all kinds secondary stuff. but then i look for, as i said, a central conflict. you've got two main characters you've subplots inevitably you've got love stories. i mean all those elements. and then when am looking at original documents, you know, if a document about some ceremony that happened in the dutch

colony in 16 whatever in in new amsterdam and there somebody the scribe is taking of it. so you've got the fact of what's going on it's some little parade commemoration or whatever and name some names and all that. but i'm looking for other things too. so if, for example, they say something like, we're here under the blue sky of blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, oh, i just got a weather report, you know, so i can that, you know, so i'm looking for those kind of to weave in to help give you a sense of being there. yeah that's neat. is there anything that. oh, if only you could have found know what do you wish you could find that has not yet been found. yeah well, i mean, you know, we just have a tiny percent, most of these 12,000 pages of material, for example, about the dutch colony. our official correspondence it's court cases council minutes official letters. and there's there's often a lot of really good dirt in there. you know like, especially court

cases. you know, it can be like he my pig, and he stole my wife. and you know and there are rape trial rules and you know, so you can find things like that but for the most part this is official stuff and it's not stuff and even when it is personal, people were kind of very decorous and you're like, yeah, but what's you know, there's something underneath here that they're not getting into. so yeah, i mean, i always say that, you know, for thousands, of pages of of material on a particular topic, if i could just spend 5 minutes there and just look and you know, you would get it in a whole other way. so and that's what you're always trying to do you're trying to bring the past back to light and and just all the senses you the sounds and the smell. yes. you know. yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. so was there any like particular though? kind of like a ha like, oh, my god. cannot believe i just found this. well, when found, for example, richard nichols writing to james

duke of york, you know, once he was governor, he was the first governor of new york. and he says, i gave this place name of new york. i mean, he told me so that says he didn't go there with this. you know, once you that you're going to call it new york after after me he told him after the fact i decided that's what i'm going to call it and so that was fun. but he was doing that while arguing with him in a very polite way because. nicholas, taken this column of the new netherland, which encompassed new jersey, a huge amount of territory. so in terms of new york harbor, he wanted to the whole harbor, manhattan island harbor and he had all these plans for it. and then the duke york writes him and says, i decided to give the western half of the harbor to a friend of mine who, had been the governor of the island jersey. and so going to call it new

jersey, this new jersey this drives nicholls crazy. it's like now i don't have control of half of this harbor that i wanted to develop. so he says so he writes to him saying i this place new york by way of trying to convince him i really need the whole yeah i need that so what he says is look i name this place new york after you that place james was also the duke of albany and he said i was going to call that western side of the river albania after you and my joke here is there are a lot of new yorkers still think of new jersey as albania. but but so and that ultimately is what, i think after four years, nichols was fed up and he for a transfer. and i think that's drove him crazy. and he actually went far as to say, look, why don't you give him delaware? delaware? so this but it was a done deal. so we're doing our time the two of us. we're going to open it up for any last that you wished i had asked you that let folks know

about. no, i think i think we covered i'm happy to hear what what people what other questions people have. i don't think on question. hear. all right. so you mentioned the dutch seem to be pretty tolerant of your friend relatively well the reason i ask because i've always read that peter stuyvesant absolutely hated the jewish popular nation in the area and i wondered if that played any role in that in the situation. it didn't play a role in this situation between in the negotiations with the english. but yeah, right to point out the limits of dutch toleration of dutch toleration really applied to other white european christians. it didn't apply to the africans who they were enslaving. it didn't apply to people who

they treated as they just thought of as completely other -- were kind in a different category. but stuyvesant himself he was this very stern son of a calvinist minister, and he thought -- were. he called them a deceitful race, didn't he? thought they would stir trouble. and there was this small jewish population he had and he wanted them out. but they you know, and this this happens repeatedly in the dutch colony, they have an official policy of toleration. and once they he tries to kick them out and the same thing happens with quakers, which is where we get the flushing remonstrance in both cases somebody writes and appeals the home country and he's overruled. so i mean. yes that's a limit on you know so there's not so much toleration. on the other hand, i mean this is that's a civil story is what it is, which what you get here, you know, there even though have a law, you know, a president say, well, i'm not going to follow that law, then it goes to

the courts and then the courts have to. and so you have to fight it out. so you see that happened throughout history. you. can you talk about long island and what was happening there during this time. yeah, well, long island was part of that well, long island. the dutch considered it to be part of new netherland. but then one happens is in in the dutch republic this is the golden age. you know this is rembrandt, vermeer. they're doing their thing. life is good there and it's hard to convince people to leave and to the middle of nowhere so they always a hard time attracting enough settlers in england they had all this turmoil, civil war and strife. so are leaving england in droves, going to new england. and then they're saying like from connecticut, from the shore, they're maine mainland. they're looking across long island and saying they've got all that land. so they start sailing across long island. and so, again, a map would be

helpful. but from new amsterdam at the tip of manhattan island, the dutch establish towns on the western end of long island in what's now brooklyn and and queens and the english sailed over from the mainland to to montauk and the hamptons and then start moving. so the dutch are slowly moving east and are slowly moving west. then in 1654 or 6053. stuyvesant actually a treaty with the english called the hartford treaty, which divides it pretty much down middle, which is the and to to this day, the division between suffolk and nassau counties. suffolk being an english name, nassau is the house of the royal dutch house. that's a remnant of that that division. i have the mike over here, they the dutch lost new york at a vulnerable time. if if the english waited the say

another ten or 20 years. do you think the dutch would have realized, wow, we have something here, we need to and it our you know, make it strong survive or that was the english take inevitable you know inevitable i don't think history's inevitable whether it's you know the allies world war two or whatever. i mean, you know, things could have gone the other way and. we're i think most of our lives we've lived in like this a historical bubble, like, oh, everything will keep going like this. and right now we're all feeling like we don't know what next year is going to be like. and that's how history is. and as someone who writes that, you try to get down to the ground to to with the people who did not know what the future was going to be in terms of whether, you know those kind of what ifs, what if the dutch had hung on longer? maybe we'd be speaking dutch right now?

i you know, you know that the butterfly, you make one change and everything changes. okay, so if you play that game, this whole this dutch colony, if it had stayed dutch longer and they gained power and were reinforced by the home country, then maybe new england would have remained separate. the southern colonies, english colonies. and therefore, would you have ever an american revolution? because you would have had this whole dynamic in the european colonizing of north america? i'm sorry, i arrived late, so maybe you address this. but the origin of the word yankee is that john key? i've heard that. i have not heard. that's a theory that that a dutch name. yankee is where yankee comes from. i don't i know of any any thing that you can use to corroborate that. but a lot of dutch, you know, words are in the language

cookies. why don't we biscuits the english eat biscuits? cookie is the dutch word. that's what it means. little coleslaw is sat, santa claus comes from sinterklaas. so there are so many elements of you know, and are to me in a way the more interesting because they kind of it's this undercurrent to show how pervasive it became. you were asking about the wider influence on america i mean, it's things like that that give you a little into that sort of thing. you're so you mentioned the differing of world views of the dutch and english and man hatten versus the puritans in new england. yeah and how that ends up playing into fundamentally the american psyche. so what would be the role of, say, the colony of virginia and i'm going to ask two questions. one, at that time, the 1600s, what was kind of the relation in

to manhattan to virginia and then is there a is a fundamental psyche of the that inherit from the from the virginia colonies that also plays into america. yeah well the relationship of the place of virginia that time in the 1600s is really the new netherland, the dutch colony. they are doing, you know, they're the great businessmen, which is attracted nicholas to them. the english in new england and, the english in virginia quickly realized that the are such good traders. they've got low tariffs, they're very efficient they're fast that when they want to send their stuff to europe, to england, they send it to new amsterdam and then the dutch take it on a ship. they're so they become these middlemen on behalf of the new englanders and the virginians. they're doing business with virginians and people in maryland in who have who are

developing plantations and that's where so some of those 290 slaves that come right at the end end up getting sold to english people in maryland. so initially in this period, it's it's it's the relation because of contiguity they're right next to new netherland that that's the and then and there's you know then if you move forward in time as more people come from england they you know you get two different dynamics the new englanders and the people who settle in virginia but that's that's later history. because i want to ask how did you get started in being interested in the dutch in new york when you wrote your first book in 2004? how did i get started with the dutch period? i lived in new york and my i've told the story a million times. my daughter, who's now 30, was a

toddler at the time. this is going back and i lived in the east village and the nearest place i could her to run around and play was the churchyard of st mark's in the bowery where which was originally peter stuyvesant family chapel. that was his farm. the east village was, his border i or farm, hence the bowery and i remember being there and looking at. so his tomb is there and there's plaque which has this long paragraph in which i think i went and realized later that there are four errors in what they say about but they didn't have google then it out and i was curious i mean i knew i knew a little bit about stivers. i knew new york was once dutch. and then i asked friends who did new york history and they didn't know the dutch period. and they somebody kind insinuated, well, they didn't really write down. then i found charlie gehring these records. and then he started to set me straight. so thank you. all