The Island at the Center of the World or Touching History

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

Author: Russell Shorto

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative–a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan–that transforms our understanding of early America.

The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

The New York Times

Relying on the fruits of Dr. Gehring's enterprise, Mr. Shorto has created far more than an addendum to familiar American history: a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past. Without the adventurous Dutch spirit and the internecine power struggle described here, "the English would probably have swept in before Dutch institutions were established, New York would have become another English New World port town like Boston, and American culture would never have developed as it did." — Janet Maslin

NY Times Sunday Book Review

New York history buffs will be captivated by Shorto's descriptions of Manhattan in its primordial state, of bays full of salmon and oysters, and blue plums and fields of wild strawberries in what is now Midtown. Here the reader may learn, among many other historical tidbits, what the Dutch really paid for Manhattan (it wasn't $24), or the key role that Flushing played in securing freedom of conscience, or why the Knicks wear blue-and-orange uniforms, or how Yonkers, the Hutchinson River and Saw Mill River Parkways, Greenwich Village and Staten Island got their names. Yet Shorto never overwhelms one with trivia, and he writes at all times with passion, verve, nuance and considerable humor. — Kevin Baker

The New York Observer - John Jeremiah Sullivan

This is one of those rare books in the picked-over field of colonial history, a whole new picture, a thrown-open window onto the intra-European struggles for dominance and the disputes over political philosophy that did indeed shape this country. With his full-blooded resurrection of an unfamiliar American patriot, Russell Shorto has made a real contribution...

Publishers Weekly

Drawing on 17th-century Dutch records of New Netherland and its capital, Manhattan, translated by scholar Charles Gehring only in recent decades, Shorto (Gospel Truth) brings to exuberant life the human drama behind the skimpy legend starting with the colony's founding in 1623. Most Americans know little about Dutch Manhattan beyond its first director, Peter Minuit, who made the infamous $24 deal with the Indians, and Peter Stuyvesant, the stern governor who lost the island to the English in 1664. These two seminal figures receive their due here, along with a huge cast of equally fascinating characters. But Shorto has a more ambitious agenda: to argue for the huge debt Americans owe to the culture of Dutch Manhattan, the first place in the New World where men and women of different races and creeds lived in relative harmony. The petitions of the colony's citizens for greater autonomy, penned by Dutch-trained lawyer Adriaen van der Donck, represented "one of the earliest expressions of modern political impulses: an insistence by the members of the community that they play a role in their own government." While not discounting the British role in the shaping of American society, the author argues persuasively for the Dutch origins of some of our most cherished beliefs and their roots in "the tolerance debates in Holland" and "the intellectual world of Descartes, Grotius, and Spinoza." Shorto's gracefully written historical account is a must-read for anyone interested in this nation's origins. (Mar. 16) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

For this popular narrative, Shorto (Gospel Truth) draws on some 12,000 public and private documents from a Dutch outpost that archivist Charles Gehring painstakingly translated for researchers in the 1960s. Shorto's resulting portrait of the vibrant society that became New York City is an entrancing one, focusing in particular on the oppositional forces of the controlling Peter Stuyvesant and the more tolerant Adriaen Van der Donck, bringing the latter, lesser-known colonial officer to light. The author exaggerates in asserting that the diversity of Dutch New York and its lasting effects on American character traits have been overlooked before his project. (See Philip Greven's 1977 study, The Protestant Temperament). However, Shorto does correctly point out that Dutch tolerance, a "grudging acceptance," was far from a belief in equality but nevertheless was forward-looking for its time. Two works published in 2003-Thelma Foote's Black and White Manhattan and Leslie Harris's In the Shadow of Slavery-provide more scholarly insights into the contradiction of the pluralistic Dutch as slave holders and traders. Shorto's book, a good read that links some characteristics of Dutch New York to today's bustling city of finance, is well worth the time of the general history enthusiast and is most appropriate for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/03.]-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The all-but-forgotten origins of Manhattan, told with humor and an acute eye for primary sources. It's good to remember, the author suggests, that the early 17th century was the age of Shakespeare, Descartes, Vermeer, and Bacon, a time of change and tumult. Not the least part of that tumult was Dutch political and legal progressivism, "their matter-of-fact acceptance of foreignness, of religious differences, of odd sorts." Tolerance, in a word, though Shorto (Saints and Madmen, 1999, etc.) is quick to point out that that meant "putting up with" rather than celebrating diversity. By the time New Amsterdam had been established, more as a business settlement of the West India Company than as a colony, its babel of nationalities were seeking balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression. "Pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, and business sharks held sway," he notes. "It was Manhattan . . . right from the start." Despite the tyrannical leanings of the colony's early directors, from Willem Kieft to Peter Stuyvesant, the crucial element that set New Amsterdam apart from its neighbors north and south was its striving toward democracy, largely in the person of Adriaen van der Donck, student of Rene Descartes and of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, of natural law and human reason. Van der Donck was a veritable Founding Father, the author asserts, though admitting that his authorship of many of the documents illustrating the push toward relative democracy in the colony can only be inferred. "Who was there, how they got along, how they mixed-that is the colony's unheralded legacy," writes Shorto. A struggle played out among military and diplomatic maneuverings and the revamping of the colony'spolitical structure. It was a legacy lived by the gallimaufry of Manhattanites, and it was written by Grotius as much as by John Locke. A bright social history of New Amsterdam that gives the Dutch their due as the first facilitators of its fabled diversity. Agent: Anne Edelstein/Anne Edelstein Agency

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Prologue: The Missing Floor	1
Pt. I	"A Certain Island Named Manathans"
1	The Measure of Things	15
2	The Pollinator	25
3	The Island	37
4	The King, the Surgeon, the Turk, and the Whore	67
Pt. II	Clash of Wills
5	The Lawman	93
6	The Council of Blood	110
7	The Cause	129
8	The One-Legged Man	146
9	The General and the Princess	167
10	The People's Champion	191
11	An American in Europe	209
12	A Dangerous Man	233
Pt. III	The Inheritance
13	Booming	257
14	New York	284
15	Inherited Features	301
	Epilogue: The Paper Trail	319
	Notes	326
	Bibliography	352
	Index	373

Book about: New Food Fast or Bacchus and Me

Touching History: The Untold Story of the Drama That Unfolded in the Skies Over America on 9/11

Author: Lynn Spencer

A nonfiction thriller chronicling moment to moment the riveting untold story of the drama that unfolded in the skies over America on 9/11 as the FAA, the military, and thousands of commercial pilots called on all of their rigorous training and their reserves of patriotism and courage to improvise a heroic response to the first attacks on American soil since Pearl Harbor and contend with a whole new kind of war in the skies.

Publishers Weekly

Through meticulous research and a talent for scene-setting, Spencer delivers a minute-by-minute account of the events of September 11, 2001, through the eyes of people in the flight industry and the military. Spencer's detailed account jumps from commercial airports to military bases to executive board rooms around the country as she depicts the events and actions of all those involved in responding to the terrorist attacks. The audio acknowledges the problems with the security system, but also the resourcefulness and determination of the many people who tried to prevent the catastrophe. At first, Joyce Bean doesn't seem the right voice in a book dominated by male voices. In some of the narrative and exhaustive parts of the text, her voice doesn't provide the energy and emphasis that is needed. However, her many masculine vocal projections are distinct and match the emotional projection of each character, making her performance a very strong one. A Free Press hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 14). (July)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

John Carver Edwards - Library Journal

Commercial airline pilot Spencer shows how, with an American public stupefied by the unimaginable airline attacks on its homeland on 9/11, civil aviation and military circles joined forces quickly to fathom, manage, and defend against a then-unknown enemy. She further conveys the sense of frustration, confusion, and terror felt by flight crews already airborne as the disasters at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded. Spencer scarcely disguises her profound admiration for these individuals who, armed with the barest intelligence, managed to bring their planes and passengers safely through the ordeal. She exhibits great sympathy for the Air National Guard fighter pilots, who managed to defend their country without sufficient authority and effective rules of engagement. And she insists that, despite the clear findings of the 9/11 Commission Report, these fighter pilots and their commanders did fashion an adequate aerial defense-even though no word had been forthcoming from their civilian higher-ups in Washington. An impressively researched and compellingly written narrative of one of America's worst catastrophes; recommended for collections on terrorism and aviation and all libraries.