(Dutch) New York History
Every autumn, I set a seasonal reading schedule. The titles are always different, but the genres remain the same. Not surprisingly, I read classic ghost stories throughout October. Come November, I’m all about early American history. Maybe it’s the dropping temperatures, the changing leaves, the hearty meals, or simply the prospect of Thanksgiving. For some reason, I associate the fall with colonial America.
Recently, I began reading The Epic of New York City by Edward Robb Ellis. Although a bit dated (published in 1966) and short on certain scholarly elements (no footnotes), the book stands as one of a few encyclopedic histories of Gotham. Its episodic chapters are highly readable. The book begins with the arrival of the first European explorers and segues into the early Dutch settlement and the founding of New Netherland.
During the past two decades, researchers and authors have begun to excavate further this brief, yet seminal period in the American story. Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World (2005) presented the reading public with a compelling history of New Amsterdam–contemporary Manhattan, for the uninitiated–and the Dutch colonial experiment in North America. Retired Fordham University Professor Roger Panetta edited Dutch New York: The Roots of Hudson Valley Culture to accompany the 2009 Hudson River Museum exhibition celebrating the quadricentennial of Henry Hudson’s trip along the Hudson River.
In his 1966 work, Ellis noted a unique feature of New Netherland: cultural and religious tolerance. Unlike its Puritan counterpart in New England, the Dutch colony never identified itself as a religious state. New Amsterdam counted Jews, Catholics, and members of various Protestant denominations as residents. Admittedly, this tolerance did not include all people and institutions: this was still the seventeenth century. Only Dutch Reformed Churches were permitted as houses of worship, and Quakers were mercilessly persecuted. Shorto explored this idea of toleration throughout his book, presenting it as the lasting legacy of the Dutch colony in New York City and America.
Reading the early history of New York reinforces the prominence of religious toleration in the American identity. It’s an idea that has inspired other societies, and the efforts of American Catholics like the Jesuit John Courtney Murray even helped convince their own church to embrace religious freedom in the 1960s. A fruit of that development was evident in some of the ideas expressed by Pope Francis’s recent encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. (Earlier this fall, we hosted a wide-ranging discussion on this work.) In the encyclical, Francis describes the mutual benefit gained from interfaith dialogue between Christians and Muslims, remarking that both faiths gain a richer understanding of God and the divine through such exchanges.
Unfortunately, Americans are once again battling over that tradition of tolerance and open debate. Amid the protests and political campaigns of the past year, an underappreciated struggle was the fight for the interpretation and even ownership of American history. At the extremes, one side argued that much of our nation’s history carried little value for the present age due its failings, while the other side declared that even the most bland critique of American history was tantamount to civic sacrilege. However, a mature and open-minded appreciation of our own history might offer lessons for tackling long-standing and current issues facing us as a nation and a people.
Today, our espoused values of cultural and religious tolerance appear to be imperiled. An honest reading of history reveals their crucial role in shaping modern-day New York. The city founded as New Amsterdam welcomed people with wildly different beliefs, practices, and faiths and New York remains a lodestar for immigrants, outsiders, and creatives. History reveals not only our nation’s faults but its strengths. History still matters.
Special thanks to the Fordham University Archives and Special Collections for the research support.
