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 Welcome to New Netherland. If you are
a first-time visitor, you are about to enter a lost world.
Then again, you may soon discover that you've been here before.
In fact, you may live here. New Netherland was a colony
founded by the Dutch on the east coast of North America in the
seventeenth century, which vanished when the English wrested control
of it in 1664, turning its capital, New Amsterdam, into New York
City. It extended from Albany, New York, in the north to
Delaware in the south. It encompassed parts of what are
now the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Connecticut and Delaware.
New Netherland got underway at about the same time the Pilgrims
were settling Cape Cod and the Jamestown colony was establishing
itself in Virginia, but you wouldn't know that from most history
books. To visit New Netherland is to see familiar places
in new ways. It is to see Manhattan not as the steel-and-concrete
center of the financial world, but a forested island with a tiny,
rough-and-ready European settlement clinging to its southern tip.
It is to imagine what is now the northeastern United States as
a virgin wilderness, inhabited by native Americans and small groups
of European settlers, who navigated not by roads or even forest
paths but by the watery highways of the region: the Hudson, Delaware,
and Connecticut Rivers. In New Netherland you will discover
familiar-sounding places: Lang Eylant (Long Island), Breuckelen
(Brooklyn), Haarlem, Staten Eylant (Staten Island) (named after
the "Staten Generaal" or States General, the governing
body in the seventeenth-century Netherlands)—all testaments
to the legacy of New Netherland and its contributions to American
history and culture.
But place names only scratch the surface of New
Netherland's legacy. From Santa Claus to log cabins, pancakes
to cole slaw, multiculturalism to upward mobility, New Netherland
influenced American culture in surprising ways.
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