The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the

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

by 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.

FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New

Publisher Description

In a riveting, groundbreaking narrative, Russell Shorto tells the story of New Netherland, the Dutch colony which pre-dated the Pilgrims and established ideals of tolerance and individual rights that shaped American history. "Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times

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. Russell Shorto draws on this remarkable archive in The Island at the Center of the World, which has been hailed by The New York Times as "a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past."

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.

Author Biography

Russell Shorto is the author of "Gospel Truth: The New Image of Jesus Emerging from Science and History," He has written for "GQ," "The New Yorker," "The Miami Herald," "Travel & Leisure," and "The New York Times Magazine," He lives in Putnam Valley, New York, with his wife and their two daughters.

Review

"Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." --The New York Times

"A tour de force. . . . The dramatic story of New York's origins is splendidly told. . . . A masterpiece of storytelling and first-rate intellectual history." --The Wall Street Journal "As readable as a finely written novel. . . . social history in the Barbara Tuchman tradition." --San Jose Mercury News

"Literary alchemy. . . . Shorto's exhaustively researched and highly readable book is a stirring re-examination. . . . Brilliant and magisterial narrative history" --Chicago Tribune

"Masterly . . . A new foundation myth . . .Shorto writes at all times with passion, verve, nuance and considerable humor." --The New York Times Book Review

"Rattlingly well told-a terrific popular history about a past that beautifully illuminates the present." --The Sunday Times [London]

"A dramatic, kaleidoscopic and, on the whole, quite wonderful book. . . . This is one of those rare books in the picked-over field of colonial history, a whole new picture, a thrown-open window. . . . [A] full-blooded resurrection of an unfamiliar American patriot." -The New York Observer

"Deserves to be a bestseller . . .narratively irresistible, intellectually provocative, historically invaluable" -The Guardian

"A spry, informative history. . . . Shorto supplies lucid, comprehensive contexts in which to see the colony's promise and turmoil. . . . [D]elivers the goods with clarity, color and zest." -The Seattle Times

"As Russell Shorto demonstrates in this mesmerizing volume, the story we don't know is even more fascinating than the one we do . . .Historians must now seriously rethink what they previously understand about New York's origins . . ." -The New York Post

"Russell Shorto fires a powerful salvo on the war of words over America's origins . . . he mounts a convincing case [that], in Shorto's words, 'Manhattan is where America began.' Readers . . find themselves absorbed in what can only be described as a plot, revolving around two strong men with conflicting visions of the future of Dutch North America." -America: The National Catholic Weekly

"Fascinating. . . . A richly nuanced portrait set against events on the world stage." --Time Out New York

"Shorto brings this . . . deeply influential chapter in the city's history to vivid, breathtaking life [with] a talent for enlivening meticulous research and painting on a broad canvas. . . . In elegant, erudite prose, he manages to capture the lives of disparate historical characters, from kings to prostitutes." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Remarkable. . . . [C]ompulsively interesting. . . . . Shorto argues that during the brief decades of its Dutch colonial existence Manhattan had already found, once and for all, its tumultuously eclectic soul." -New Statesman

"Shorto delineates the characters in this nonfiction drama convincingly and compellingly." -Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"[An] absorbing, sensual, sometimes bawdy narrative featuring whores, pirates, explorers and scholars. With clarity and panache, Shorto briskly conveys the complex history of the age of exploration." -Times Literary Supplement

"Shorto's book makes a convincing case that the Dutch did not merely influence the relatively open, tolerant and multicultural society that became the United States; they made the first and most significant contribution." -American History

"Shorto's prose is deliciously rich and witty, and the story he tells-drawing heavily on sources that have only recently come to light-brings one surprise after another. His rediscovery of Adriaen van der Donck, Peter Stuyvesant's nemesis, is fascinating." -Edward G. Burrows, coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History

"A landmark work . . .Shorto paints the emotions and attitudes of his characters with a sure hand, and bestows on each a believable, living presence." -The Times (London)

"A triumph of scholarship and a rollicking narrative . . . an exciting drama about the roots of America's freedoms." -Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Review Quote

"Astonishing . . . A book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past." -- The New York Times "A tour de force. . . . The dramatic story of New York's origins is splendidly told. . . . A masterpiece of storytelling and first-rate intellectual history." -- The Wall Street Journal "As readable as a finely written novel. . . . social history in the Barbara Tuchman tradition." --San Jose Mercury News "Literary alchemy. . . . Shorto's exhaustively researched and highly readable book is a stirring re-examination. . . . Brilliant and magisterial narrative history" Chicago Tribune "Masterly . . . A new foundation myth . . .Shorto writes at all times with passion, verve, nuance and considerable humor." The New York Times Book Review "Rattlingly well tolda terrific popular history about a past that beautifully illuminates the present." The Sunday Times [London] "A dramatic, kaleidoscopic and, on the whole, quite wonderful book. . . . This is one of those rare books in the picked-over field of colonial history, a whole new picture, a thrown-open window. . . . [A] full-blooded resurrection of an unfamiliar American patriot." The New York Observer "Deserves to be a bestseller . . .narratively irresistible, intellectually provocative, historically invaluable" The Guardian "A spry, informative history. . . . Shorto supplies lucid, comprehensive contexts in which to see the colony's promise and turmoil. . . . [D]elivers the goods with clarity, color and zest." The Seattle Times "As Russell Shorto demonstrates in this mesmerizing volume, the story we don't know is even more fascinating than the one we do . . .Historians must now seriously rethink what they previously understand about New York's origins . . ." The New York Post "Russell Shorto fires a powerful salvo on the war of words over America's origins . . . he mounts a convincing case [that], in Shorto's words, 'Manhattan is where America began.' Readers . . find themselves absorbed in what can only be described as a plot, revolving around two strong men with conflicting visions of the future of Dutch North America." America: The National Catholic Weekly "Fascinating. . . . A richly nuanced portrait set against events on the world stage." --Time Out New York "Shorto brings this . . . deeply influential chapter in the city's history to vivid, breathtaking life [with] a talent for enlivening meticulous research and painting on a broad canvas. . . . In elegant, erudite prose, he manages to capture the lives of disparate historical characters, from kings to prostitutes." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Remarkable. . . . [C]ompulsively interesting. . . . . Shorto argues that during the brief decades of its Dutch colonial existence Manhattan had already found, once and for all, its tumultuously eclectic soul." New Statesman "Shorto delineates the characters in this nonfiction drama convincingly and compellingly." Fort Worth Star-Telegram "[An] absorbing, sensual, sometimes bawdy narrative featuring whores, pirates, explorers and scholars. With clarity and panache, Shorto briskly conveys the complex history of the age of exploration." Times Literary Supplement "Shorto's book makes a convincing case that the Dutch did not merely influence the relatively open, tolerant and multicultural society that became the United States; they made the first and most significant contribution." American History "Shorto's prose is deliciously rich and witty, and the story he tellsdrawing heavily on sources that have only recently come to lightbrings one surprise after another. His rediscovery of Adriaen van der Donck, Peter Stuyvesant's nemesis, is fascinating." Edward G. Burrows, coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 , winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History "A landmark work . . .Shorto paints the emotions and attitudes of his characters with a sure hand, and bestows on each a believable, living presence." The Times (London) "A triumph of scholarship and a rollicking narrative . . . an exciting drama about the roots of America's freedoms." Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life From the Trade Paperback edition.

Excerpt from Book

Chapter 1 THE MEASURE OF THINGS On a late summer''s day in the year 1608, a gentleman of London made his way across that city. He was a man of ambition, intellect, arrogance, and drive--in short, a man of his age. Like our own, his was an era of expanding horizons and a rapidly shrinking world, in which the pursuit of individual dreams led to new discoveries, which in turn led to newer and bigger dreams. His complicated personality--including periodic fits of brooding passivity that all but incapacitated him--was built around an impressive self-confidence, and at this moment he was almost certainly convinced that the meeting he was headed toward would be of historic importance. He walked west, in the direction of St. Paul''s Cathedral, which then, as now, dominated the skyline. But the structure in the distance was not the St. Paul''s of today, the serene, imperial building that signifies order and human reason, with the spirit of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment shining from its proud dome. His St. Paul''s had a hunkering tower in place of a dome (the steeple that had originally risen from the tower had been struck by lightning almost half a century before and hadn''t been replaced); it was a dark, medieval church, which suited the medieval market town that London still was in the early seventeenth century. The streets through which he walked were narrow, shadowy, claustrophobic, sloping toward central sewer ditches. The houses that lined them were built of timber and walled with wattle and daub--it was a city made chiefly of wood. Since we know his destination and have some notion of the whereabouts of his house, it is possible to trace a likely route that Henry Hudson, ship''s captain, would have taken on that summer day, on his way to meet with the directors of the Muscovy Company, funders of voyages of exploration and discovery. The widest thoroughfare from Tower Street Ward toward Cordwainer Street Ward was Tower Street. He would have passed first through a neighborhood that, despite being within sight of the scaffold and gallows of the Tower itself, was an area of relatively new, "divers fair and large houses," as John Stow, a contemporary chronicler, described, several of them owned by prominent noblemen. On his left then came the dominating church of St. Dunstan in the East, and a reminder of his heritage. The Muscovy Company had not only funded at least two of Henry Hudson''s previous sea voyages; going back through its history of half a century, it contained several Hudsons on its rolls. Among its charter members in 1555 was another Henry Hudson, who rose from a humble "skinner," or tanner, to become a wealthy member of society and an alderman of the City of London, and who may have been the explorer''s grandfather. So our Henry Hudson was presumably born to the sea and to the company both, and inside the church he was now passing, his Muscovy Company namesake lay, beneath a gilded alabaster stone inscribed: Here lyeth Henry Heardsons corps, Within this Tombe of Stone: His Soule (through faith in Christ''s death,) to God in Heaven is gone. Whiles that he lived an Alderman, And Skinner was his state: To Vertue bare hee all his love, To vice he bare his hate. If in his walk the seaman chose to detour down the hill past the church, he would have come to the open expanse of the Thames, where the view west downriver was dominated by the span of London Bridge with its twenty stone arches, houses perched precariously along both sides of its course. Directly across the river, beckoning lowly and enticingly, lay Southwark, a wild outland and thus also the entertainment district, with brothels tucked into its alleys and, visible from here, the "bear bayting" arena, which provided one of the most popular distractions for the masses. Beyond it stood the rounded wooden structure of the Globe Theater in its original incarnation. Indeed, somewhere over on the Southwark side at this very moment, amid the tradesmen, whores, "sturdye Beggers," and "Common Players in Enterludes" that populated the borough, Shakespeare himself--at forty-four a near-exact contemporary of Hudson, then at the height of his powers and fame as the leading dramatist of the day--was likely going about his business, sleeping off a night of sack at the Mermaid with his actor friends Richard Burbage and John Heminge, maybe, or brooding over the foolscap sheets of Coriolanus, which was written about this time and which, coming on the heels of the great tragedies, may have felt a bit hollow. Tower Street became Little Eastcheap, which in turn merged into Candlewick and then Budge Row. Hudson''s business lay here, in an imposing building called Muscovy House, home of the Muscovy Company. The medieval look of the London of 1608 belied the fact that England''s rise to global empire was under way, and one of the forces behind that rise lay through these doors. From the bravado of its formal name--the "Merchants Adventurers of England for the Discovery of Lands, Territories, Iles, Dominions, and Seigniories Unknown"--one might be excused for thinking it had been founded out of sheer, unstoppable exuberance. The original band of merchants and aristocrats who had formed it more than half a century earlier included many of the most distinguished men in London in the middle of the sixteenth century--the Lord High Treasurer, the Steward of the Queen''s Household, the Keeper of the Privy Seal, the Lord High Admiral--as well as sundry other knights and gentlemen. But while global exploration, the great intellectual and business opportunity of the day, had brought them all together, no one considered the undertaking a swashbuckling adventure. It was desperation that drove them toward new horizons. The England of the 1540s had been a backwater, economically depressed, inward-looking, deep in the shadows of the great maritime empires of Spain and Portugal. Wool was the country''s chief commodity, but English traders had been blocked from access to major European markets for more than a century. Economic stagnation was bound up with intellectual stagnation: while the Renaissance was in full flower on the Continent, English interest in the wider world was slim, and the few long voyages of exploration England had mounted were mostly led by foreigners, such as the Venetian John Cabot (ne Giovanni Cabotto). When it came to sea voyages, the English declined. History traditionally links the rise of England in the period with the elevation of Queen Elizabeth to the throne in 1558. But one could trace it to 1547, when an intellectually voracious twenty-year-old named John Dee did something countless students since have done: spent his summer abroad and returned flush with new knowledge and insights. After an academic career at Cambridge in which he proved to be something of a mathematical genius, Dee traveled to the University of Louvain in what is today Belgium. The rich summer sun of the Brabant region might have been revelation enough, but Dee soon found himself in a lecture hall gazing at an object that was, to him, transcendent. The teacher was Gemma Frisius, a Flemish mathematician and charter of the heavens, and what Dee saw was a map astonishing in its level of detail, in the new lands it portrayed, even in its lettering. The Low Countries, he discovered, were miles ahead of his island in new learning. Dee spent long candle-lit nights poring over Frisius''s maps with a Flemish scholar named Gerhard Kremer. Kremer, an engraver by training, had, under the academic pen name of Mercator, begun to make a name for himself ten years earlier by creating a map of Palestine that rendered the Holy Land with greater accuracy than had ever been achieved. Mercator was a genuine Renaissance man--a master cartographer, an engineer of telescopes, sextants, surveying equipment, and other highly sensitive measuring devices, the author of a gospel concordance, promoter of the new italic typeface that made map print more legible--and in him Dee found a soul mate. In 1569, Mercator would publish the map that would give him his immortality, which rendered latitude and longitude as straight lines, the meridians of longitude evenly spaced and the distance between the parallels of latitude increasing in size as one approached the poles. It would solve a cumbersome problem of navigating at sea because with it sailors could plot and follow a straight course rather than have to constantly recalculate their position. (The Mercator projection is still a feature of navigational maps, although, even at that time, some mariners were as confused as later generations of schoolchildren would be by the distortions in size it caused.) In a nice foreshadowing of the complicated intermingling between the Low Countries and the British Isles that would shape the next century, when Dee returned to London he brought with him maps, measuring instruments, and globes, created by Mercator and Frisius, that would help spark England''s rise to global prominence. What Dee''s English colleagues found most intriguing about the maps and globes was an area most people would ignore: the top, the Arctic Circle. Frisius''s map, oriented as if looking down from the north star, showed a distinct open channel cutting across the Arctic, which was self-confidently labeled in Latin Fretum trium fratrum. The sight of the boldly indicated Strait of the Three Brothers must have made Dee''s English friends gasp. The Holy Grail for all learned and adventuresome minds was the discovery of a short passage to the riches of Asia. Finding it would repay investors many times over; for the English, it would vault their economy out of the Middle Ag

Details ISBN1400078679 Author Russell Shorto Short Title ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WO Pages 416 Language English ISBN-10 1400078679 ISBN-13 9781400078677 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 974.710 Year 2005 Publication Date 2005-04-30 Series Vintage Illustrations Yes Residence Putnam Valley, NY, US Imprint Random House Inc Subtitle The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Publisher Vintage DOI 10.1604/9781400078677 Audience General/Trade

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  • Condition: New
  • ISBN-13: 9781400078677
  • ISBN: 9781400078677
  • EAN: 9781400078677
  • Type: Textbook
  • Format: Trade Paperback (Us) ,Unsewn / Adhesive Bound, Paperback
  • Language: English
  • Author: Russell Shorto
  • Publisher: Random House USA INC International Concepts, Random House
  • Subject: History & Military

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