400 years of Dutch-American Stories

Blog overview

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.

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 …...

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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 …...

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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 …...

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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? …...

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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 …...

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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 …...

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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 …...

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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 …...

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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 …...

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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 …...

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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 …...

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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, …...

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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 …...

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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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