Dutch colonists settled in the area that originally belonged to Canarsee Indians not long after founding New Amsterdam in 1625. Eighteenth-century Kings County - today the borough of Brooklyn - included the towns of Brooklyn ( Breuckelen), Bushwick ( Boswijck), Flatbush ( Vlacke Bos or Midwout), Flatlands ( Nieuw Amersfoort), Gravesend, and New Utrecht.
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Russell Shorto, the Brooklyn event’s keynote speaker, has expanded on some of this scholarship in his well-known book The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (2005) when he argues that Dutch tolerance and free market trade helped shape not just New York culture but American culture in general.Ĭertainly, although not often acknowledged, the Dutch colonial period left its mark on American culture, but it is especially evident in communities that had a Dutch-American majority like Kings County. Such scholarship has been able to bring light to the importance of the Dutch colonial period, because, as Dennis Maika points out, this era provided the region’s “historic foundation.” New York “grew out of the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age,” and acknowledging this foundation helps to understand how New York has become what it is now, he explains, especially when considering civic culture, religious tolerance, and free market trade. But the Dutch colonial period had even more long-lasting, albeit less tangible, influences.ĭeparting from the more traditional, Anglo-focused narrative of American history, a growing number of scholars have been researching America’s Dutch past in recent decades, many of them with support from the NNI and transcriptions and translations by Charles Gehring and Janny Venema of the New Netherland Research Project. Their cultural heritage is evident today in family and street names, words like cookie and boss, and the architecture of some eighteenth-century homes that still stand.
Many Dutch-American descendants continued to speak the Dutch language, worship in Dutch Reformed churches, eat Dutch-originated foods, and celebrate Dutch holidays well into the early nineteenth century. Although New York transferred to English control in the late seventeenth century, Dutch-American ways of life persisted throughout the region.
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