Reveals the little known history of one of history’s most famous maps – and its maker Tucked away in a near-forgotten collection, Virginia and Maryland as it is Planted and Inhabited is one of the most extraordinary maps of colonial British America. Created by a colonial merchant, planter, and diplomat named Augustine Herrman, the map pictures the Mid-Atlantic in breathtaking detail, capturing its waterways, coastlines, and communities. Herrman spent three decades travelling between Dutch New Amsterdam and the English Chesapeake before eventually settling in Maryland and making this map. Although the map has been reproduced widely, the history of how it became one of the most famous images of the Chesapeake has never been told. A Biography of a Map in Motion uncovers the intertwined stories of the map and its maker, offering new insights into the creation of empire in North America. The book follows the map from the waterways of the Chesapeake to the workshops of London, where it was turned into a print and sold. Transported into coffee houses, private rooms, and government offices, Virginia and Maryland became an apparatus of empire that allowed English elites to imaginatively possess and accurately manage their Atlantic colonies. Investigating this map offers the rare opportunity to recapture the complementary and occasionally conflicting forces that created the British Empire. From the colonial and the metropolitan to the economic and the political to the local and the Atlantic, this is a fascinating exploration of the many meanings of a map, and how what some saw as establishing a sense of local place could translate to forging an empire.

Employing a frontier framework, this book traces intercultural relations in the lower Hudson River valley of early seventeenth-century New Netherland. It explores the interaction between the Dutch and the Munsee Indians and considers how they, and individuals within each group, interacted, focusing in particular on how the changing colonial landscape affected their cultural encounter and Munsee cultural development. At each stage of European colonization - first contact, trade, and settlement - the Munsees faced evolving and changing challenges. Understanding culture in terms of worldview and societal structures, this volume identifies ways in which Munsee society changed in an effort to adjust to the new intercultural relations and looks at the ways the Munsees maintained aspects of their own culture and resisted any imposition of Dutch societal structures and sovereignty over them. In addition, the book includes a suggestive afterword in which the author applies his frontier framework to Dutch-indigenous relations in the Cape colony.

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. Drawing on the archives of the New Netherland Project, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative 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.

Examining the interaction of the Dutch and the English in colonial New York and New Jersey, this study charts the decline of European culture in North America. Balmer argues that the combination of political intrigue, English cultural imperialism, and internal socio-economic tensions eventually drove the Dutch away from their hereditary customs, language, and culture. He shows how this process, which played itself out most visibly and poignantly in the Dutch Reformed Church between 1664 and the American Revolution, illustrates the difficulty of maintaining non-English cultures and institutions in an increasingly English world. A Perfect Babel of Confusion redresses some of the historiographical neglect of the Middle Colonies and, in the process, sheds new light on Dutch colonial culture.

More than 22 million people speak Dutch-primarily in the Netherlands, Belgium, Suriname, and the Antilles. Roland Willemyns here offers a well-researched and highly readable survey of the Dutch language in all its historical, geographic, and social aspects. Willemyns tells a story of language contact and conflict. From its earliest days, Dutch has been in intense contact with other languages both within and outside the borders of the Low Countries, particularly with French, Frisian, and German. The first part of Dutch concentrates on the historical development of standard Dutch and its dialects. The second part focuses on contemporary Dutch, including its many dialects in Flanders and Holland (some of them on the verge of extinction). Willemyns pays special attention to important questions in the history of Dutch, particularly the contentious matter of the global spread of Dutch through colonization-which led to "exotic" variations such as Afrikaans, pidgins, and creoles-and whether Dutchmen and Flemings are "separated by the same language." His final chapter tries to shed some light on the future of Dutch, and the impact of such "new" varieties as Poldernederlands (in Holland) and Verkavelingsvlaams (in Flanders). Placing the Dutch story in the context of other West-Germanic languages like German and English, Dutch: Biography of a Language is the only English language history of Dutch and will be sure to interest a global audience of students of Dutch, those of Dutch descent, and linguists and other scholars wishing to learn more about Dutch.

Examines the many facets of the Hudson’s rich history, distinctive regional culture, and important contributions to the development of modern America. Since its inception in 1984, The Hudson River Valley Review has taken an eclectic and interdisciplinary approach to a region that has long been recognized for its role in American colonial history; its important contributions to American arts, letters, and architecture; its role in the economic development of the nation; and its significant and ongoing contributions to American culture and history. This collection of essays brings together eighteen of the best essays from the Review’s first twenty-five years of publication. From natives and newcomers to twentieth-century leaders, the authors of these essays examine the many facets of the Hudson’s rich history, distinctive regional culture, and important contributions to the development of modern America.

The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo presents the history of the nation's forgotten Dutch slave community and free Dutch-speaking African Americans from seventeenth-century New Amsterdam to nineteenth-century New York and New Jersey. It also develops a provocative new interpretation of one of America's most intriguing black folkloric traditions, Pinkster. Jeroen Dewulf rejects the usual interpretation of this celebration of a "slave king" as a form of carnival. Instead, he shows that it is a ritual rooted in mutual-aid and slave brotherhood traditions. By placing these traditions in an Atlantic context, Dewulf identifies striking parallels to royal election rituals in slave communities elsewhere in the Americas, and he traces these rituals to the ancient Kingdom of Kongo and the impact of Portuguese culture in West-Central Africa. Dewulf's focus on the social capital of slaves follows the mutual aid to seventeenth-century Manhattan. He suggests a much stronger impact of Manhattan's first slave community on the development of African American identity in New York and New Jersey than hitherto assumed. While the earliest works on slave culture in a North American context concentrated on an assumed process of assimilation according to European standards, later studies pointed out the need to look for indigenous African continuities. The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo suggests the necessity for an increased focus on the substantial contact that many Africans had with European--primarily Portuguese--cultures before they were shipped as slaves to the Americas. The book has already garnered honors as the winner of the Richard O. Collins Award in African Studies, the New Netherland Institute Hendricks Award, and the Clague and Carol Van Slyke Prize.