A Firm Peace and Sincere Friendship?
Four Centuries Dutch-American Stories
Published on 1. April 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
300 pages
978-90-485-7153-6 (ISBN)
Description
For four centuries, people from the Netherlands have gone to America by boat or plane, to explore the country, to trade, to colonise, to settle, to do business, to find a new future or simply to visit the country as a tourist. And for four centuries, Americans, of diverse backgrounds, of native, African or European descent, have come to the Netherlands. These are their stories.
This book begins in the seventeenth century, when settlers commissioned by the West India Company settled on the south side of Manhattan and started a settlement that grew first into New Amsterdam and later into New York City. In 2024, both the Netherlands and the United States will commemorate these beginnings through commemorations, exhibitions, conferences and high-level Dutch visits to New York. 2024 is therefore a prime opportunity to tell the stories of the people who crossed the ocean and shaped the relationship between the Netherlands and the United States, and with New York in particular. The stories have a human touch, an emphasis on the individual as the bearer of one culture interacting with another. Feelings of admiration, liberation, expectation and hope play an important role in the stories. But there are also negative sides to Dutch-American history, for instance when it comes to the relationship with Native Americans and the Dutch role in American slavery. It is not going to be exclusively jubilant: success stories alternate with black pages here.
This book begins in the seventeenth century, when settlers commissioned by the West India Company settled on the south side of Manhattan and started a settlement that grew first into New Amsterdam and later into New York City. In 2024, both the Netherlands and the United States will commemorate these beginnings through commemorations, exhibitions, conferences and high-level Dutch visits to New York. 2024 is therefore a prime opportunity to tell the stories of the people who crossed the ocean and shaped the relationship between the Netherlands and the United States, and with New York in particular. The stories have a human touch, an emphasis on the individual as the bearer of one culture interacting with another. Feelings of admiration, liberation, expectation and hope play an important role in the stories. But there are also negative sides to Dutch-American history, for instance when it comes to the relationship with Native Americans and the Dutch role in American slavery. It is not going to be exclusively jubilant: success stories alternate with black pages here.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
Netherlands
Target group
Academic
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
100 farbige Abbildungen
100 Illustrations, color
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
560 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-485-7153-6 (9789048571536)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Dr. Jaap Jacobs is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. He specializes in early American history and early modern Dutch expansion, particularly in North America. He previously published The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America.
Content
Prefaces, Foreword A Question Mark? 1 A Dutch-American Perspective 2 'Even old New York was once New Amsterdam' 3 Mayken's World 4 Mass Murder on Manhattan 5 Edward Winslow Anglo-Dutch-American Pilgrim 6 The Tale of the White Horse The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland 7 Sight, Sound, Touch, and Taste Sensing the Dutch in New Netherland 8 The Dutch Republic through Bostonian Eyes The Travel Journals of Jonathan Belcher and Jacob Wendell, 1704-1716 9 Johnny Goes Dutch 10 Fellow Founding Fathers Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and Thomas Jefferson 11 On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution 12 Sweet Prospects and a Bitter Experience The Adventures of Gerrit Boon and Jan Lincklaen 13 Sojourner Truth How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America's Black Liberation Movement 14 John Romeyn Brodhead's Hunt for History 15 Rising from the Ashes The Afterlife of a Phoenix 16 "For Two Years, or Perhaps Forever" Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley and the Artists' Colony in Rijsoord 17 Jane Addams and Aletta Jacobs at the Women's Congress in The Hague 18 Breaking Free from a Girls' Boarding School? American Mass Culture and the Roaring Twenties in the Netherlands 19 The 'Patron Saint' of New York? 20 A Dutch Prince, His American Jeep, and Two Female Passengers, 21 A Saber for Eisenhower, Forging Transatlantic Bonds for the Twentieth Century 22 Growing Up Dutch in Iowa 23 Recollections and Reconnections, War History as Family History 24 Lady Liberty as Muse, An Inspired Dutch Writer's Love for the United States of America 25 Hurley and its History, Historical Views Changing over Time 26 When Did It All Begin? Acknowledgments, Contributors, Further Reading & Sources, Illustration Credits, Index