New York History

446 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY Roundtable: The Past, Present and Future of New Netherland Studies Introduction The study of the Dutch West India Company’s holdings in the New World, in particular New Netherland, is no longer a marginalized field among historians. This is a recent development. As late as the 1990s, historians often focused only on North America’s English colonies, overlooking New Netherland. Scholars who developed an interest in the Dutch colony were required to justify the subject of their research or cast the colony simply as a precursor to New York. Recently, some historians began setting aside the traditional assumptions and stereotypes that shielded New Netherland’s past from serious inquiry. Their work has not only advanced our understanding of this colony; it has required historians of other regions to justify their neglect of this complex and diverse region. Scholars have injected a good deal of intellectual excitement into the field, attracting graduate students and young researchers from disciplines ranging from history and linguistics to literature and material culture. As a result, historical scholarship on New Netherland is one of the fastest growing fields in early American studies.1 Three interconnected events helped drive scholarly interest in New Netherland’s history. The first was the 1974 partnership between the New York State Library and the Holland Society of New York, which sponsored the New Netherland Project (now the New Netherland Research Center). Since then, the Center’s staff, notably Dr. Charles Gehring and Dr. Janny Venema, has translated and published nearly seven thousand pages of primary documents once tucked away in the archives of the New York State Library. The new trove of primary sources generated a good deal of excitement among academics, but it was not until 1999 when Joyce Goodfriend published “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History” in New York History that the field took on its own life. In her essay, Goodfriend challenged scholars not to see New Netherland as simply the precursor to 1. As late as 1993, Karen Ordahl Kupperman acknowledged that American historians had ignored New Netherland far too long, and that most considered “Dutch colonization and the continuing Dutch presence has constituted an uncomfortable, somewhat indigestible, lump in early American history”; see her “Early American History with the Dutch Put In,” Reviews in American History 21:2 (1993): 195. Documents and Interpretations 447 England’s colony, New York. Such an “Anglocentric rendering” of history, she argued, “reduced the Dutch to comic figures . . . instead of portraying them as actors in the drama of empire.” Goodfriend was not the only one researching New Netherland’s history, but she was the first to urge scholars to use the recently translated documents to strip away “misinformation and misrepresentation” of the colony’s history.2 Finally, much of the popularity the field enjoys today is connected to the 2004 publication of Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. Shorto’s book brought the colony’s history to life for general readers.3 Once, historians of colonial America dismissed New Netherland as a failed colony, which allowed them to move on to subjects they deemed more significant, such as the settlement of New England or Virginia. However, recently scholars have ably demonstrated that New Netherland was a complex colonial society—one worthy of study. While Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World remains the only popular history on the Dutch colony, a number of accessible guidebooks and historical atlases bring part of its history to a broad audience.4 The New Netherland 2. Joyce D. Goodfriend: “Wrighting/Righting Dutch Colonial History” New York History 80:1 (1999): 4–28. This was not Goodfriend’s first work on New Netherland; she had completed a pathbreaking study on slavery; see, Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Burghers and Blacks: The Evolution of a Slave Society at New Amsterdam,” New York History LIX (1978); Goodfriend’s full-length study on ethnic diversity covered only part of New Amsterdam’s history; see, Joyce D. Goodfriend, Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664–1730 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992...