400 years of Dutch-American Stories

This blog is the first of a monthly series with stories from the rich history shared by the American and the Dutch people. Authors from both countries will present a range of stories, full of triumphs and disappointments that come with hundreds of years of shared history. Not all stories will be ‘feel-good history’. While the relations between the Dutch and the Americans have for the most part been stable and peaceful, the shared history contains some darker moments as well. Acknowledging that errors have been made in the past does not take away from the friendship but, rather, deepens it.

When Did It All Begin?

by Jaap Jacobs

May 27, 2024

It seems a simple enough question: when was New York founded? So when and how should we celebrate or commemorate it? As we come to the end of this blog series, Jaap Jacobs takes a look at previous commemorations of Dutch-American friendship. An exploration of what shaped these events leads to the question of how …...

Recollections and Reconnections: War History as Family History

By Eline Hopperus Buma

May 1, 2024

During the Second World War, a Dutch-Jewish family had to go into hiding to avoid deportation to Germany. When the war was over, they emigrated to the United States. Almost eighty years later, they remain in contact with the Dutch families that helped them survive. Eline Hopperus Buma reveals how the war created a tale …...

Sight, Sound, Touch, and Taste: Africans Sensing the Dutch in New Netherland

By Lavada Nahon

March 27, 2024

In early New Netherland and New Amsterdam new arrivals, Black and white, tried to recreate the world they had left. As historical sources are scarce and incomplete, historical interpreter and culinary historian Lavada Nahon uses deep empathy and imagination to depict the sensory world of the enslaved. It is easy to put the Africans on …...

Hurley and its History: Historical Views Changing over Time

By Bas Blokker

February 20, 2024

Travelling from Washington D.C. to Milwaukee, Dutch journalist Bas Blokker makes a stop-over in Hurley, N.Y., and discovers its Dutch history. His curiousity is piqued and he dives into the past to find the nineteenth-century views of the Dutch colonizers very different from modern ones. During the last five years, I always crossed the Susquehanna …...

The Dutch Republic through Bostonian Eyes

By Sander Rooijakkers

January 23, 2024

In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, two young travelers from Boston made trips to the Dutch Republic. One was from Boston stock, the other a Dutch New Yorker, born in Albany. They visited the same sites and wrote about their experiences, but their views are quite different. In the eighteenth century, countless young …...

A Sabre for Eisenhower: Forging Transatlantic Bonds for the Twentieth Century

Jorrit Steehouder

December 18, 2023

Using a royal gift as a starting point, Jorrit Steehouder shows how ties between the United States and the Netherlands were forged through rituals and symbols, as well as through personal friendships. On October 14th, 1947, a crisp and sunny autumn day, General Dwight D. Eisenhower celebrated his 57th birthday in style. At the Dutch …...

Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley and the artists’ colony in Rijsoord

by Alexandra van Dongen

November 23, 2023

Stories handed down through the generations have a powerful impact. Alexandra van Dongen was always fascinated by the life of her American great-grandmother, an artist who eventually settled in the Netherlands. But Alexandra’s pursuit deepened when she unearthed her ancestor’s passion for an even earlier ancestor, whose actions in the nineteenth century speak to issues …...

Fellow Founding Fathers: Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and Thomas Jefferson

By Lauren Lauret

October 25, 2023

The American Revolution had a significant impact on the Dutch Republic. The end of the eighteenth century was marked by a spirited exchange of ideas on liberty, political rights and state-building between the two Republics. But it was not merely ideas which travelled freely. People from both sides of the Atlantic sailed across the ocean …...

American Mass Culture and the Roaring Twenties in the Netherlands

by Kees Wouters

September 25, 2023

During the 1920s, the Netherlands excelled in dullness, it is said. But Kees Wouters shows how the cobwebs of pillarized society were blown away by a new musical wind from the West: Jazz! Exalted by many, villified by others, Dutch musicians playing American jazz conquered music halls and radiowaves alike and even made the Dutch …...

Lady Liberty as Muse

By Annejet van der Zijl

August 22, 2023

The United States of America and the Netherlands are a rich source of inspiration to Dutch and American writers. The American journalist Russell Shorto found the origins of American tolerance in the histories of Amsterdam and New Amsterdam. Vice versa, Annejet van der Zijl, a Dutch author, found her muse in the United States, as …...

Edward Winslow: Anglo-Dutch-American Pilgrim

By Jeremy D. Bangs

June 20, 2023

The early history of the Dutch in America is not confined to the Hudson River and the surrounding areas, but extends deep into New England. In 1620 a group of settlers from Leiden journeyed across the Atlantic to settle in North America. They are often overlooked in surveys of Dutch-American relations, because their history does …...

Rising from the Ashes: The Afterlife of a Phoenix

by Joske Meerdink

May 17, 2023

During a late evening walk, journalist Joske Meerdink decided to turn right and go across the local graveyard. It lead to an unexpected find that sets off a voyage of discovery, taking Joske across the Atlantic. As she pieced together the story of a group of nineteenth-century Dutch migrants from the village of Winterswijk in …...

Jane Addams and Aletta Jacobs at the Women’s Congress in The Hague

By Mineke Bosch

April 18, 2023

Social activism and the struggle for women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century brought together women from countries around the world, including the United States and the Netherlands. Mineke Bosch highlights how shared issues fostered a deep friendship between the American Jane Addams and the Dutch Aletta Jacobs. Berlin, May 1915. Three feminists on an …...

Sojourner Truth

By Jeroen Dewulf

March 21, 2023

How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America’s Black Liberation Movement On 31 March 1817 the New York legislature decided that enslavement within its borders had to come to an end. Final emancipation would occur on 4 July 1827. Coincidentally, the date of choice was almost exactly two centuries …...

Growing Up Dutch in Iowa

By Valerie Van Kooten

February 19, 2023

What does it mean to be of Dutch extraction in the United States? Pella, situated on the Iowa plains, was the destination of choice for hundreds of Dutch families, led by Hendrick Pieter Scholte, after the Afscheiding (Secession) of 1834 split the Dutch Reformed Church. What is still Dutch and what has changed over time? …...

The Dutch-American Perspective

By Russell Shorto

January 18, 2023

The work that historians do influences their lives, especially if they spend a considerable time in a foreign land that they write about. Slowly, their topic of choice becomes an essential part of their identity. Russell Shorto, a renowned writer of narrative history, writes about his own evolution at the intersection of Dutch-American history. This …...

The Adventures of Gerrit Boon and Jan Lincklaen

by Jaap Jacobs

December 15, 2022

The Holland Land Company is known for its role in settling the western part of upstate New York by acquiring land grants and selling off lots to prospective settlers in the early nineteenth century. Yet its activities in the last decade of the eighteenth century were of a different nature, as the stories of …...

On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution

By Michael Douma

November 21, 2022

There are a few topics that guarantee a historian an audience. Write a decent biography of Abraham Lincoln or James Madison, for example, and you are bound to have readers. Or, write something new and interesting about the Constitution and you might attract some attention. I began studying the Dutch in America over 20 years …...

Johnny goes Dutch

by Jaap Jacobs

October 18, 2022

When John Adams arrived in the Dutch Republic as the American envoy, he was accompanied by his two sons. They were both expected to attend school so as to further their education, but finding the right place turned out to be a bit of a problem. Johnny may have only been twelve years old, but …...

The Tale of the White Horse: The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland

By Dennis J. Maika

September 18, 2022

The first direct shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in New Amsterdam in 1655. The voyage of the White Horse came in the wake of significant changes in the Dutch Atlantic. In this blog, American historian Dennis Maika outlines how family and business connections shaped the development of a slave-trading center in Manhattan. New Amsterdam’s …...

John Romeyn Brodhead’s Hunt for History

by Jaap Jacobs

August 23, 2022

Over the centuries, numerous American visitors to the Netherlands produced travel accounts, filled with their fresh insights and observations as they viewed the familiar from a foreigner’s perspective. John Romeyn Brodhead is no exception, but he was not a regular tourist. He was, or rather became, a man with a mission, hunting for history in …...

Mass Murder on Manhattan

By Mark Meuwese

July 20, 2022

Settler colonialism is not a story of friendly relations throughout. The confrontation with an unfamiliar other creates wariness and suspicion and often leads to violent outbursts in which noncombatants become innocent victims. Manhattan in the seventeenth century was no exception, as the events of 1643 show. In the evening of February 25, 1643, soldiers and …...

New Amsterdam: What’s in A Name?

by Jaap Jacobs

June 20, 2022

The small colonial town that the Dutch founded in North America was called New Amsterdam. We now know it as New York City. The story of how the name evolved has many twists and turns and is, in fact, a tale of war and peace. New Amsterdam was the talk of the town in 1953, …...

Mayken’s World

By Nicole Maskiell

May 24, 2022

On December 28, 1662, a woman named Mayken van Angola pursued freedom in New Amsterdam. She did not stand alone. Two other women—Susanna and Lucretia—stood with her and together, they petitioned the colonial government for their freedom. It was granted with the caveat that they must clean the Director General Petrus Stuyvesant’s house once a …...

The “Patron Saint of New York”

by Jaap Jacobs

April 19, 2022

The bonds that connect the American and Dutch peoples have been commemorated in various ways and at various levels. Dutch-American Friendship Day is a well-established annual event at the governmental level. In New York City, the historical memory of Petrus Stuyvesant has recently become controversial, but in the twentieth century his image was iconic. Two …...

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