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The Castello Plan map, depicting the broad way (Broadway) and the Wall (Wall Street)

This New York City Map Is Full of Dutch Secrets

When Broadway was a broad way and Wall Street was a wall.
by April White via Atlas Obscura on March 19, 2024
Painting of a Dutch merchant with his wife and an enslaved servants, standing on the shore with Dutch ships sailing in the background

The Legacies of Calvinism in the Dutch Empire

In the 17th century, Dutch proselytisers set out for Asia, Africa and the Americas. The legacy of their travels endures.
by Charles H. Parker via Aeon on December 9, 2021
View of New Amsterdam from the 1620s.

The Dutch Roots of American Liberty

New York would never be the Puritans' austere city on a hill, yet it became America’s vibrant heart of capitalism.
by John O. McGinnis via Law & Liberty on April 10, 2025
A drawing of a ship firing cannons at another vessel.

On the Colonial Power Struggle That Would Give Birth to the City of New York

For historian Russell Shorto, it was all about water.
by Russell Shorto via Literary Hub on March 18, 2025
Purple and yellow illustration of Lower Manhattan skyline, with letters of "Manahata" as buildings.

How New York Was Named

For centuries, settlers pushed Natives off the land. But they continued to use indigenous language to name, describe, and anoint the world around them.
by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro via The New Yorker on April 13, 2021
Repairs being made at the site of a water main break
partner

What Early American Infrastructure Politics Can Teach the Biden Administration

Infrastructure plans are always political. The key is being inclusive and focusing on the public good.
by Keith Pluymers, Harrison Diskin via Made By History on March 16, 2021
family Thanksgiving meal

The Dark and Divisive History of America’s Thanksgiving Hymn

How a beloved song with origins in 16th-century Europe captures both a holiday's spirit of unity and a country's legacy of exclusion.
by Neil J. Young via The Atlantic on November 23, 2017
Drawing of Swedish colonists landing on the Atlantic shores of Delaware during the 1600s.

America’s Forgotten Swedish Colony

For nearly 20 years in the 17th century, Sweden had a little-known colony that spanned parts of Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
by Evan Andrews via HISTORY on July 25, 2017

‘This Land Is Yours’

The missing Black history of upstate New York challenges the delusion of New York as a land of freedom far removed from the American original sin of slavery.
by Nell Irvin Painter via New York Review of Books on March 9, 2025
Group of white people carrying a sign that thanks Donald Trump

Make South Africa Great Again?

How the country’s post-apartheid politics may inform the world view of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
by Isaac Chotiner, William Shoki via The New Yorker on February 19, 2025
Aerial photo of housing projects in the Bronx.

Suffering, Grace and Redemption: How The Bronx Came to Be

On the early history of New York City's northernmost borough.
by Ian Frazier via Literary Hub on September 6, 2024
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge.

Five Centuries Ago, France Came to America

This is the story of Giovanni da Verrazzano, who never reached Asia, but became the first European to set foot on the site of the future city of New York.
by Diane de Vignemont via France-Amérique on March 5, 2024
Statue of Sojourner Truth.

The Remarkable Untold Story of Sojourner Truth

Feminist. Preacher. Abolitionist. Civil rights pioneer. Now the full story of the American icon's life and faith is finally coming to light.
by Cynthia R. Greenlee via Smithsonian on February 12, 2024
Santa catches the trolly to Bloomingdales.

In the 1800s, a Group of NYC Artists and Writers Created the Modern-Day Santa Claus

See how Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore and Thomas Nast made Santa the merriest man in Manhattan.
by Lucie Levine via 6sqft on December 8, 2023
A painting of an American landscape with green hills and a river.

The Early Days of American English

How English words evolved on a foreign continent.
by Rosemarie Ostler via Lapham’s Quarterly on September 15, 2023
For most of her 74 years, Ruth Ann Hills took a certain innocent pride in her family’s story and its place in Staten Island history. Generations of her family had resided in Mariners Harbor on the island’s North Shore. She and her brother David Thomas live in the house their grandfather built on Van Pelt Avenue. They had found Black ancestors on Staten Island as far back as the 1700s, and incredibly they had all eluded slavery. Or so Hills thought. All of that changed one day in 2021, when Hills received a visit from a filmmaker. Heather Quinlan was working on a documentary about a nearby graveyard. Over the course of her genealogical research, Quinlan had discovered that one of the people buried there was Hills’ great-great-great-grandfather. Neither Hills nor Thomas had ever heard of the man, Benjamin Prine, but his death in 1900 at the age of 106 had been covered by the New York Times and the wire services. Prine, a U.S. veteran of the War of 1812, had been the last enslaved person born on Staten Island, Quinlan told them. A photograph of a man, seated, holding a cane. The photograph has a long caption beneath, that is headlined "THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME." Hills' and Thomas' great-great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Prine. Staten Island Historical Society. Prine had once been enslaved by Peter Van Pelt, a highly influential Dutch Reformed Church minister – meaning that the street on which the siblings now live took its name from the same white family that enslaved their ancestor. “I thought I was a big history buff. ‘Oh, I know about history,’” Hills said. “I guess I was naive.” A crosswalk scene underneath two large street signs that both read "Van Pelt Av." The intersection of Van Pelt Avenue and Forest Avenue on Staten Island. Reece T. Williams/Gothamist

How the Remains of Formerly Enslaved People Came to Rest Beneath a Staten Island Strip Mall

Benjamin Prine's descendants didn’t know about their family ties – or their connection to his enslaver.
by Arun Venugopal via Gothamist on February 9, 2023
Daniel Mytens' painting of George Calvert, the First Lord Baltimore (1578-1632). (Collection of the Enoch Pratt Free Library / Baltimore, Maryland).

The English Origins of American Toleration

Can the origins of American religious freedom be traced to the religious and political history of England and its empire?
by Scott Douglas Gerber via Law & Liberty on June 15, 2022
An illustration of boats in the water.

Capitalism, Slavery, and Economic White Supremacy

On the racial wealth gap.
by Calvin Schermerhorn via CARICOM on December 21, 2020

The Ladder Up

A restless history of Washington Heights.
by Carina del Valle Schorske via VQR on December 14, 2019

How New York City Found Clean Water

For nearly 200 years after the founding of New York, the city struggled to establish a clean source of fresh water.
by Jonathan Schifman via Smithsonian on November 25, 2019
Map of New England from 1856.

The 400-Year-Old Rivalry

Understanding the rivalry between England and the Netherlands is crucial to understanding that between New England and New York.
by Liz Covart via The Junto on June 26, 2019
Map of New York City.

Here Grows New York City

An animation of the historical trends of New York's growth since its founding.
by Myles Zhang via MylesZhang.org on July 25, 2018
Pilgrims going to church armed with guns.

God and Guns

Patrick Blanchfield tracks the long-standing entanglement of guns and religion in the United States. Part 1 of 2.
by Patrick Blanchfield via The Revealer on September 25, 2015
Manhattan Island, half with buildings and half wooded as it looked before New York City was built.

New York - Before the City

Mannahatta's fascinating pre-city ecology of hills, rivers, wildlife when Times Square was a wetland and you couldn't get delivery.
by Eric W. Sanderson via TED on July 1, 2009
A cream colored map depicting the Middle Passage and trade routes between North America, South America, Africa, and Europe.

What Was Africa to Them?

How historians have understood Africa and the Black diaspora in global conversations about race and identity.
by Kwame Anthony Appiah via New York Review of Books on September 27, 2007
A painting by J. M. W. Turner depicting a slave ship throwing its dead into the stormy waters.

The Slave Trade and the Jews

Jews have long been feared as the power behind inexplicable evils. Responsibility for the African slave trade has recently been added to this list of crimes.
by David Brion Davis via New York Review of Books on December 22, 1994
A map of the United States divided into regions.

A Balkanized Federation

Without a shared civic narrative – the pursuit of liberal democratic self-government – the rival regional cultures of the United States agree on very little.
via Nationhood Lab

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