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

If your interested in Early NY state or city you need to give this book a read. It does a wonderful job painting the 17th century world when the Dutch founded New Netherland's the first European colony in what would become New York. He is maybe a little too harsh on the English occasionally as he is trying to prove how the Dutch are just as worthy of praise for American founding as the English, but he does a very good job comparing the Dutch and Early New Netherlands. The book is really a triumph of non-fiction historical narrative. It really is the story of the Dutch founding of New Netherlands told in a compelling way with several main characters like Van Der Donck and Director Kieft. I loved the small details that let you imagine how different the 17th century world was even from that of the 18th century. He mentions armour several times and Pikes (long spears) that were used in the 17th century as relics of the Middle Ages. Details of the colonies early Forts and houses is also interesting. He also includes Dutch European history at the time and their war with the Spanish which is pretty crucial to the story. Anyone interested in 17th century colonization should give this a read. His argument that the Dutch broader idea of tolerance affected America just as much as the Puritans is interesting and even if you don't 100% agree it's still a wonderful read and paints Early New York in a way no other book I've read before does.

I liked this book - a lot! I like it so much I've bought copies for several family members and friends. I like it so much that I will not part with my own copy, but intend to keep it in my small library. The Island at the Center of the World is the story of Dutch Manhattan and the Hudson north to Albany. It covers the time period from the first establishment of a trading colony by the Dutch until the colony was surrendered to the British, a period of some sixty years. Having lived near the Hudson, paddled its waters and spent time in New York City the book has special meaning because there is so much that is familiar in it, yet I knew nothing of its genesis or how it still impacts my life today. For instance, I find it fascinating that Broadway was an Indian trading route before the Dutch arrived. It continues today on much of its original path. The Dutch were traders, not nation builders. They opened their doors to anyone and everyone who wanted to work and do business. This created a cosmopolitan mixture of races, religions, values and customs that generated a tolerance for and acceptance of differences that continues to this day in that great city. The fact that the Dutch were focused on business and trade rather than religion and nation building is one reason why New York became a world trading center and the state earned the title of "Empire State". We who have grown up in the state and lived along the Hudson will recognize the familiar names of Schuyler and Van Rensselaer and be surprised at how Yonkers got its name. We all know the story of how Manhattan was purchased for $24.00 worth of trinkets, but will be surprised at the Dutch traders understanding of Indian ideas of property ownership. This allowed them to live and work peacefully side-by-side for many years. You will see how the caricature of the peg legged governor, Peter Stuyvesant, does such an injustice to the real man. You will learn how the tradesmen's struggles to establish self-government that incorporated ideals of free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom set the tone for what would become the Thirteen Colonies and the United States Constitution. This book is extremely well researched and written. Shorto somehow makes a great yarn out of a scholarly work on this original Dutch colony. I can't recommend it highly enough. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

For those who are from the New York City area or have an interest in it, the story of the pioneering Dutch settlement there is truly fascinating. I'm not sure Russell Shorto is the person to tell it, but, nevertheless, the book is out there. He states that no one else before him has told it quite like him because of a new, large cache of previously untranslated Old Dutch language documents from that era that have only recently been translated and became available to him and other researchers. In short, he writes like a tabloid newspaper writer who must now write a serious piece. It is very annoying that he constantly uses artistic license to recreate possible conversations and occurrences. Furthermore, it is clear that his perspective on the early history of New York (New Netherlands) and the rest of the world lacks depth. The book reads, but I was always wondering what I might have been missing. To be fair, however, the book does tell a story effectively, and it does have an impressive bibliography. And when he just sticks to the facts the book gets even more interesting and believable. It is also great to discover the Dutch origins of many aspects of the City, such as Yonkers, Bronx, Broadway, the Bowery, Wall Street, etc., etc. It is also great to get an idea of who Stuyvesant was, but learning about the other founders, Van der Donck and Kieft, was just as fascinating. Learning about how the British selfishly and forcibly stole the settlement from the Dutch futher opened my eyes. Furthermore, Shorto also opened my eyes to Sweden's pioneering colonial involvement in what is now the state of Delaware. I just wonder how others would have written this story. It seems like most of the story came from sources other than this newly discovered cache of Dutch documents. As an aside, after reading this book, you will be titilated by reading Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkel and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and other stories he wrote that take place in Old Dutch settlement here. In the early 1800's, when Irving wrote, he was extremely popular.

Oh, wonderful. This book is so beautiful written. His description of Henry Hudson's family's participation in the investment house that funded his trips, the transition to describing London, the bridge, its environs, then this: "Beyond it stood the rounded wooden structure of the Globe Theater in its original incarnation." Wow. That was so Cool. And so unexpected. I felt like I was watching some Hollywood film where you start your view from above the world and slowly you descend, London comes in view, here's where the rich people live, here's where the whores live, and oh yeah, that's where Shakespeare entertained them both. Besides the writing style, I really enjoy the structure of the book. I've read quite a lot about the Thirty Years War, the enlightenment, the English civil war, the early settling of our nation - but never in a way that allows me to integrate the effects these events visited, collectively, on the settlement and character development of this country. Shorto ties it all together in one neat little package. Admittedly, unless you have read about each of these events separately, it’s truly hard, for example, to appreciate just how devastating the Thirty Years War was for Europe. One interesting insight Shorto offers, however, that struck a chord in me, is that Western European civilization viewed war, in and of itself, as the natural state of being; that is, before the treaty of Westphalia and the loss of 40-45% of its population during the Thirty Years War. What a horror. A loss even greater than during WWII as a percentage of the population. After that ‘peace’ became the natural state. With war becoming the last act. Hence, Clausewitz: "War is the continuation of politics by other means". Additionally, one can talk about the inspiration that enlightenment figures had on our founding fathers and our founding documents, but I, for one, would not have tied the Thirty Years War and the English civil war together, inextricably linked, to the birth of this nation through the Dutch or the English settlement, thereof, or for that matter the French settlement in the new world. And surprise, surprise. Who the heck would have known about the Swedes? Never had a clue. Shorto completely surprised me with their imperial foray into the new world. Because I read history as a sequence of events, a continuum in time and space, but not in chronological order, e.g., I read about ancient Rome then jump to the history of Manhattan, I end up rendering history as linear and sequential. I rarely have the benefit of seeing it as a survey of a given time – like one experiences when in college, through discussion and careful planning on the part of a professor - I tend to lose sight of the fact that history is more like the collision of atoms in a fixed space, each crash and bang moving other objects, unpredictably, in new directions. Well, sorry for going off the deep end. I like this guy so much that I’m going to read his “Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason”.

We all grew up in our American history classes with the image of peg-legged old Peter Stuyvesant ruling chaotically over the short-lived Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. They were a sorry lot, these Dutch, who didn't understand what they had on Manhattan, an island that awaited the organizational verve of the English to finally get under way toward its present greatness. Would you believe that this view of the Dutch is a lot of poppycock? According to author Russell Shorto, it is that and worse. His book THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, published by Doubleday, tells the story of the Dutch colonization of Manhattan and large portions of the land around that island in the seventeenth century. Because the actual Dutch records of that colonization have only recently been unearthed from libraries, we've more or less accepted the view of Dutch incompetence that has been foisted upon us by history. That is, by English history. As Winston Churchill famously remarked, history is written by the victors, and in this case, the English won the day when they laid a naval blockade on Manhattan in 1664 and took over the colony. According to Shorto, that triumph resulted in a very skewed and inaccurate presentation of what the Dutch achieved in Manhattan, and therefore of what American culture owes them. The main character is, of course, Peter Stuyvesant, the man who surrendered to the English. When he arrived in New Amsterdam in 1647, the town had just a few hundred citizens and was located at the very southern tip of Manhattan Island, around the area of present-day Battery Park. It was low, rude and dirty. Stuyvesant was the representative of the Dutch West India Company, which had founded the colony. Subject to very poor leadership, the town was in need of a clear-headed, strong-minded leader, and Stuyvesant certainly was both of those. He was also a company man, and the idea of the citizens ruling themselves in any sort of way was simply beneath Stuyvesant's notice. It would be madness, the antithesis to the seventeenth century idea that God grants the right to lead only to the right sort of person and that all the rest should follow. The leveling sentiments of the American Revolution were one hundred thirty years away in the unforeseeable future. But there were a few others in New Amsterdam who viewed themselves as viable contenders to lead the colony, and one of these was Adrian Van der Donck. An educated attorney who had taken full advantage of the new liberalisms of thought offered in Dutch universities by such as Descartes, Grotius and Spinoza, he had arrived in the colony some years before. The Dutch were already known for their tolerance of modes of thought and behavior other than their own. A great trading people, a people of the sea, the Dutch had for centuries been aware of the diversity of peoples elsewhere in the world. Amsterdam itself was noted for its polyglot, diverse culture, and Van der Donck had seen all this. Van der Donck is the second protagonist of this remarkable book, and it is the ongoing struggle between these two men that fills its pages. Van der Donck and some others plagued Stuyvesant for years by pleading the case before him, and then before the Dutch Estates General in Amsterdam, that the Dutch West India Company's rule was stifling to the citizens of the colony and, worse, lousy for business. Stuyvesant, in their view, ruled badly with an iron-hand. Commerce was stifled by his authoritarian rigidity. The rising English and Swedish power in the region, based in the sizable colonies that those two countries had established nearby, was a continuing threat. Van der Donck and his friends presented brief after brief to the Estates in an attempt to break the Dutch West India Company's autocratic hold over Manhattan and to replace it with a more republican-style government devoted to open trade. They made remarkable progress with this idea and indeed the Dutch government had arrived at the moment of voiding the West India Company's contract in the colony. But ultimately these efforts failed because of England's Oliver Cromwell and his wish to break up the Dutch influence on the seas. It began as a trade war and then became a real one when the First Anglo-Dutch War broke out in July, 1652. Van der Donck and the Dutch West India Company suddenly changed in the eyes of the Dutch government. War made the company's seeming stability in the colony appear all-important. It also made them think that Van der Donck perhaps was not really the progressive man of brilliant ideas for commerce and governance, but rather a dangerous agent of change who could ruin The Netherlands' efforts to defend its own territory. Stuyvesant was back in charge. Van der Donck was out in the cold. But the long-term effects of his efforts lasted beyond the war and beyond the Dutch colony itself. They resulted in much that became very important to the development of the American colonies and, finally, the United States. "Van der Donck's dream became real in a way he never imagined," Shorto writes. "The structure he helped win for the place grounded it in Dutch tolerance and diversity, just as he hoped it would, which in turn touched off the island's rapid growth and increased the influx of settlers from around Europe, just as he predicted. What he didn't predict was that the English would appreciate this fact, and maintain the structure, and that it would support a future culture of unprecedented energy and vitality and creativity." One of the most interesting stories in this book is that of what happened to the documents that were kept by the Dutch colony and its officers. This trove of papers that go so far in explaining the complexity of the issues of New Netherland lay unnoticed for a few hundred years in various libraries. Only in the 1970's, when the translation of the papers to English finally began, did the importance of the Dutch influence in New York begin to get truly clarified. The last chapter of THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD is a little coda in which Shorto tells of the journey of the records of the colony over two and a half centuries, in the New World and the Old, always out of the public eye. It is a riveting small essay on great good fortune. If you do not value librarians and those who care about the written record, you should read this chapter. It will certainly set you straight because these New Netherland papers survived through swashbuckling derring-do and because of a deep concern for history on the part of a very few individuals over the centuries. The records were neglected, subject to mould, fire, wars and general indifference. But they remain more or less intact now because of the lucky interest of the few individuals that seemed to understand what they had in hand. Without them, the records would have perished, this book wouldn't have been written and the ongoing revelations of the true importance of the Dutch Manhattan colony would have been lost to us. For those interested in why New York is New York, and why the United States developed the way it did, those efforts - and this book - are invaluable. Terence Clarke is a novelist, journalist and film maker who writes about the arts at [...]

I first purchased this book in paper form, but found the combination of small print size, complicated sentence structure and outlandishly long sentences intolerable. I switched to the audiobook version narrated by the author and really enjoyed it. Since it was the author himself speaking, he made the long complicated prose very understandable and enjoyable. The story is very interesting....... no, it is fascinating.... and presents a story never told before.

Fascinating history of New Amsterdam. Before the British took over and changed name to New York

This was a really fascinating look at an era of pre-American history that has been woefully neglected. The colony of New Netherland and the Dutch influence on what would become the New York ethos is undeniable, but would have remained hidden to me without this book. Shorto did an excellent job arguing for the Dutch place in American history. A great book and worth reading if you are interested in American history before the colonies or in the history of New York.

Well written and interesting subject matter.

Really well written and helped me understand The Netherlands and Dutch culture.

Expédition rapide. Un excellent livre pour ceux qui aiment l'histoire et celle de Manhattan en particulier. Une plongée dans l'histoire de cette ville étonnante.

This book is about the original Dutch colony founded on the island of Manhattan, originally called New Amsterdam. I knew it existed, but that was literally the limit of my knowledge - so this book was a real eye-opener. It charts the history of the colony: its internal struggles with the West Indian Company and its directors, mostly famously Peter Stuyvesant; the on-off again conflicts with the Native Americans; its rivalries with the neighbouring Swedish and English colonies; and its eventual takeover by England during the period breakout of war between England and the Netherlands. It also serves to highlight just how great the influence of the Dutch was in the founding of America - how New York was and always has been a very different creature to the other early cities, like Boston and Philadelphia. I couldn't put this book down. It's as readable as a novel and twice as interesting. If only all non-fiction could be written like this. I don't think I've ever come across such a wonderfully written history book. Take this section for example: "This book invites you to do the impossible: to strip from your mental image of Manhattan Island all associations of power, concrete, and glass; to put time into full reverse, unfill the massive landfills, and undo the extensive leveling programs that flattened hills and filled gullies; to return streams from the underground sewers they were forced into, back to their original rushing or meandering course. To witness the return of waterfalls, to watch freshwater ponds form in place of asphalt intersections; to let buildings vanish and watch stands of pine oak, sweetgum, basswood, and hawthorne take their place. To imagine the return of salt marshes, mudflats, grasslands, of leopard frogs, grebes, cormorants, and bitterns; to discover newly pure estuaries encrusting themselves with scallops, lamp mussels, oysters, quahogs, and clams. To see maple-ringed meadows become numbered with deer and the higher elevations ruled by wolves. And then to stop the time machine, let it hover for a moment on the southernmost tip of an island poised between the Atlantic Ocean and the civilization of Europe on one side and a virgin continent on the other; to let that movement swell, hearing the screech of gulls and the slap of waves and imagining these same sounds, waves and birds, waves and birds, with regular interruptions by wracking storms, unchanged for dozens of centuries. And then let time start forward once again as something comes into view on the horizons. Sails." When was the last time you read history written like that?

Brilliant book about the American History of Manhattan. Does not read like a history text although it is chock full of historical facts.