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The jacket copy for this fascinating book nowhere describes author Russell Shorto as a professional historian. True, he has written two other books on subjects dealing with the past (the historical Jesus and the relationship of psychiatry to religion), but his blurb writers conspicuously avoid the "H" word.
Just as well. He writes sprightly, almost novelistic prose --- and he is indeed a man with a mission: He wants to destroy the common conceptions (misconceptions, he calls them) that English influence was the only force that brought New York City into being and that the nearly 40-year existence of the New Netherland colony was merely an unimportant preliminary throat-clearing before the "real story" began with the English takeover in 1664. He goes about this worthy task with missionary zeal and literary zest.
His main historical source is a huge mass of documents from the New Netherland period now being translated in an obscure office in the New York State Library by historian and linguistic scholar Charles Gehring, to whom he give full credit. But he has also unearthed all sorts of fascinating documents, both historical gems and delightful trivia, in England, in the Netherlands, all over the USA and in various odd venues on the European continent.
The names that every school kid knows from that era -- Peter Minuit and Peter Stuyvesant -- are duly present; Stuyvesant, of course is a major player in the drama. But to them Shorto has added at least two others -- Adriaen Van der Donck, a young Dutch lawyer who fought long and hard to moderate Stuyvesant's rigidity and intolerance in favor of a more liberal philosophy of government, and Willem Klieft, a bullheaded bureaucrat whose foolish pugnacity nearly ruined the whole enterprise. All four of these men, and a fascinating cast of lesser players, are drawn in the round with novelistic verve. If you think "history" is a synonym for "dull," this book will change your mind. There are occasional patches of needlessly purple prose and hyperbole, but they are easily negotiated.
Shorto places the founding of the colony firmly in the historical context of the military and mercantile rivalries among England, Holland and Spain. New York's "father city" was not London but Amsterdam, he argues, and his evidence is convincing. (The vast colony was New Netherland; the island city was New Amsterdam). It is more than a matter of surviving Dutch street names and family names in the region; it involves a basic philosophy of religious and racial toleration, a system of representative government and a spirit of inquiry and adventure that survive in the city today.
The original New Netherland colony, founded in 1625, took in everything from present-day Delaware to Connecticut. Manhattan Island was the nerve center because of its stretegic position on a fine harbor and a broad river that led north into the interior of the unexplored continent. The true hero of Shorto's tale is Van der Donck, a man now so utterly forgotten that even the single portrait of him that survives may not even be him at all. Shorto makes him out a gutsy battler for justice and tolerance and a careful recorder of every detail he could find about the wild new land he came to love.
Indians, of course, are a major presence in this story, and Shorto is careful to do them justice. You can almost hear him cheering when Willem Klieft, who stirred up a needless and bloody war against them, is shipwrecked and drowned.
There are all sorts of delightful asides, digressions and details in this book (did you know that the classic log cabin of the American frontier seems to have originated with Finnish craftsmen imported into the Swedish-settled southern regions of New Netherland?). It is hard, when you think of the great metropolis of asphalt and steel that is Manhattan Island today, to imagine it as a wilderness with clear streams, a few Indian paths and dense vegetation, which is what it was during its New Amsterdam period (1625-1664) --- but Shorto has done a splendid job of imagining it for us. If that describes the historian's job, then Shorto is a first-rate historian, no matter what the jacket copy says.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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