Remember that Old New York Was Once New Amsterdam: The Dutch Roots of American Pluralism

and finally good morning yeah enough hearty welcome to you brave souls who have agreed to sign up for a day-long immersion in the in an ocean full of ideas and issues that will leave you both exalted and exhausted we thank you for coming and promised that your heroic effort will not have been in vain though we never have a formal theme for university for a day American the world always seems to fit the bill we Americans tend to see ourselves at once a part of the world a part of the world and apart from the world that is separate and different from the world we have been known to be self-absorbed exceptional istic Winston Churchill once observed that we Americans always do the right thing once we've exhausted all other options Daniel Boorstin the late librarian of Congress once gave a lecture called the Fertile verge complimenting us on being a different and perhaps better American in every generation my favorite description of us came from the kamati of brilliant immigrant from Australia our critic Robert Hughes who said as a cut that as a country he described us as a country whose making never ends I really like that we Americans tend to have hope notwithstanding the troubles of our times which like the generation that precedes J all the generations have preceded us we see as uniquely terrible optimism can be naive if it comes from a total denial of reality but when it is a measured and deliberate mindset you might say slightly disingenuous they couldn't give us the will the skills and the energy to change the world I think we should hang on to it which leads me to our first lecture but before that I do want to thank the most generous our most generous man factors is grant an area foundation and the Neighborhood Development trust fund for supporting University four-day and now Daniel Jurek associate professor of history here at the University taught a Schemmel course unexceptional is unlike some of you remember last year I'm sure that's one of the big reasons that you're here and that some some had the ability have had the opportunity to take it's not an easy subject as as as it has to do not just with facts but with attitudes and it's very tricky he did it by century and when he came to the 17th he focused on the Dutch and the special one could say exceptional culture that they brought to the new world that culture and we call it pluralism some of us do has had a profound impact on our identity and our public policies so please join me in welcoming David York to the podium to ask us to remember that old New York was once New Amsterdam Thank You Sondra and thank you all for coming today like Sondra mentioned this came out of a class was teaching an American exceptionalism and it sparked my interest and I think many of the students in that class as well and so what I'd like to do today is is build on that that class from last fall and and and go from there and so to do that I want to start with the separatists King James ascension to the English throne in 1603 marked the beginning of a new wave of troubles for the nation's religious dissenters Puritans in particular received special attention from James when in the gathering of advisers he declared I shall Harry them out of the land in the face of this growing pressure and imprisonment one group known as a separatists we have come to call them the pilgrims decided to leave England for a land where they could practice their faith in peace where there would not be imprisoned for their belief where they would not be forced to pay taxes to support a religion they did not believe in this destination was of course the Netherlands right this varies from the traditional narrative the pilgrims we associate with coming to America with coming to New England and establishing a colony but in 1608 they chose the Netherlands because it was a place of religious toleration they chose the Netherlands because of its reputation as welcoming to religious dissenters and that's exactly what they found when they traveled to the university town of light they settled there they established themselves there they established their church but what they found in in many ways to their great dismay was that there was too much freedom they without the threat of the King without the threat of imprisonment they actually began to fight among themselves they began to fight over issues of infant baptism they began to fight over issues of Ministers that began to fight over location of churches more even than that they were concerned that their children were becoming too Dutch the freedom of the Netherlands was alluring to their children and they weren't strictly adhering to their religious code they weren't strictly adhering to the beliefs of their parents and so they decided it was time to leave and these pilgrims then left not a land that was too repressive but somewhat ironically too free to come to the Americas and establish a colony and the Mayflower in 1620 when American students are often asked about why the pilgrims came to North America they say religious freedom and as I've just outlined that's true but only to a point their interest wasn't in freedom so much for themselves or for everyone else but but simply for themselves right they wanted freedom to practice their faith as they saw fit they weren't terribly tolerant of others especially generations later when you had dissenters who were shipped off to establish Rhode Island when the Quakers came in the Quakers were seen as a great threat they wanted no one but Puritans and later Congregationalists which was the state-sponsored religion of Massachusetts so what I want to talk about today then is not the pilgrims but the place they went to first so we'll start with the Dutch Empire the Dutch Empire with only two million residents in the 16th and 17th century managed to become one of the major players on the sort of global economic stage right they had an empire that stretched from Indonesia to South Africa to the Caribbean and ultimately to North America they did this in part by using this idea of joint stock companies it was a sort of modern economic idea that allowed them to sort of have investors share the risk of traveling overseas and the rewards in some cases they also had and what attracted the pilgrims a tremendous devotion to Liberty and if you look at the ideals and if you look at the character of the Dutch Republic of this era it looks to us strikingly modern right this devotion to Liberty of freedom of the press tremendous upward mobility tremendous religious toleration it wasn't freedom so much as toleration right they simply sort of allowed different groups to come into their their country to their Republic and exist right they still sort of believed that the Dutch Reformed Church was the true church but they tolerated others who came in and you had French Huguenot you the pilgrims you had Jews from around the world who came to the Netherlands looking for that toleration looking for that freedom part of this too is that they were a republic they lacked a sort of true central state and the diversity of Republic Republic's have inherently with these different pieces that are brought together under a single umbrella lead to this need for toleration because you have these differences of ideas and strikingly john adams himself in 1782 said speaking of the united states and the netherlands that the originals of the two republics are so much alike that the history of one seems to be but the transcript from that of the other so Adams in 1782 saw similarities between the Dutch Republic and the young American Republic it's that Republic in this vein of sort of expansion and an economic gain that they hired a British and English explorer Henry Hudson to sail for the Dutch East India Company ostensibly and initially to look for a Northwest Passage to look through a water route through North America and on several occasions he believed he had found it right and these two waterways now bear his name right first he sailed up the Hudson River began to sail north he believed that any minute he'd come out in the Pacific right not fully understanding how much further he had to go but you can understand this right if you're down in Manhattan the Hudson River looks big right by the time you get north north of Albany it's a little less a little less promising but also in Hudson Bay and this is actually his as far as we know his final resting place he had sailed again on another voyage trying to find the Northwest Passage he sailed with his crew it was getting later and later in the year and he said just a little further we'll come out in the Pacific we'll be able to resupply everything will be fine and his crew was less and less faithful eventually mutiny and leaving him in a landing craft in the middle of the bay that bears his name they turned around and they only about half of them made it back because they were right they were going to run out of supplies and winter was coming fast but it was those failed efforts to find a Northwest Passage in many ways he was just about what four hundred years too early right it's coming now we'll fight with Canada and the Russians and but it's those failed efforts that allow the Dutch to establish claims on what is today New York the boundaries of the Dutch West India companies they created the Dutch West India Company to manage this territory the boundary stretched down to what they called the South River or today the Delaware River is up to the Hudson River which they called the North River and as far east as what we would call the Connecticut River today the fresh River so there's a boundaries of the Dutch West India Company's fort they established fort orange what is today Albany in 1617 as a trading outpost and issues of trade are what brought the Dutch to this territory right this was their primary goal trade with the Native Americans in the region and this would dominate much of their mission much of what they're trying to do they they set aside missionary work in part because of where they were coming from there wasn't a real sort of religious impulse coming out of the Dutch Republic and in 1624 they were given provincial status within the Dutch Empire that also meant that there was a great need to increase the population and they did this they allowed many settlers from around Europe to come into this territory you had French settlers you had Dutch settlers you had German settlers Belgian settlers so from the very beginning they're inviting in a wide from a seventeenth century perspective diverse population right into this territory into this region that diversity posed something of a challenge right the diversity in a fairly wide swath of territory governing that that territory but also in terms of who's there all right trying to sort of bring them all together into one unit one of the first efforts to try to unite the colony to a degree is Peter Minuit effort to of the capital to what is today Manhattan and his famous purchase of Manhattan in 1626 right this is sort of a notorious it's come to be a notorious purchase in that he paid was I'm trying to find the exact phrasing and I'm the exact number but he paid the equivalent of about 40 pounds of beaver pelts right for this territory and people say look at this amazing land deal you know he really sort of gave the Indians a short under the stick in this negotiation but if you put it in a broader context it's a bit more of a cultural misunderstanding than a sort of land deal sort of heavily favored towards the Dutch because the way that the tribe that sold him this territory viewed it wasn't so much as an out-and-out purchase but as more of a lease or the right to travel through the territory and in fact Manhattan would have Native Americans living on it until the 1680s right so they remained even after they theoretically sold this land it was more of a shared use policy than an out now purchase right the way that sort of come down within American lore and and myth once there once he had made this purchase he was in sort of this ideal location to try to unify the colony because this was a major port and is to this day a major port on the eastern seaboard and it allowed him to establish what was effectively a company town in the form of New Amsterdam right this was not yet simply a chartered city within the Dutch Empire but literally a company town run by the Dutch West India Company right and so this the the people who live there were more employees and then citizens and this was somewhat problematic again for trying to govern this territory because these are these are these are employees whose whose goal is to make money and so they weren't always sort of civic minded more than they were trying to make a bargain with the Indians or creating separate deals with the Indians or different groups of Indians and causing conflict they also tended to be somewhat rowdy when they weren't bargaining so you had lots of taverns you had brothels you had rough-and-tumble port city within what is today New York on top of those internal challenges there's a growing threat from New England especially when the New Englanders who the Dutch called Yankees this by the way roughly translated was was land pirate and it referred to New Englanders so with apologies to the New York baseball fans Yankees his New Englanders so you've got some issues there right but the New Englanders had settled a colony or an outpost a city in Hartford right on the Connecticut River right on what the Dutch saw as their eastern boundary and as the numbers of New Englanders continued to grow there's external pressure to do something to deal with the sort of border threat an internal pressure of trying to bring some sort of organization to this city with diverse and separate interested citizens or subjects Minuit's term ends without much fanfare in part because he's not able to bring a lot of sort of order to this territory and he's replaced by William Keith who mismanaged that mismanages things terribly the company is not doing terribly well there's pressure on him to cut costs and he bungles Indian relations terribly so much so that there is an Indian war right and here the purpose of the colony is trade the purpose of the colony is to work with Native Americans and keep sort of so mismanages things that it breaks down into violence many subjects of the town are terribly upset by this right because their goal had been to make money and things have been so mismanaged that you have violence and you don't have a lot of trade when there's a war going on and so largely because his own subjects are pushed back against him he's removed from power and replaced by sides Peter Stuyvesant is brought in because there's a recognized need for order alright there's an understanding of the external threat coming from New England and there's an understanding of the internal sort of disorder that exists in New Amsterdam and so he comes in and he does that he brings order he helps sort of stabilize things he begins to develop an infrastructure he builds roads he helps establish schools right he develops external relations with New Englanders he actually recognizes that Connecticut's sort of the real threat so he goes to Massachusetts and begins to knows negotiate with the governor of Massachusetts to try to calm things down there and he does fairly well they establish a treaty they do say that the today the Connecticut River will be the eastern boundary and he basically gives up nothing so he helps secure the borders he does bring some order and and calm to the internal structure of the territory but he also does it heavy handedly he doesn't do it with much popular support he himself doesn't like the religious diversity and the toleration that he's experiencing in New York he believes that everybody should be a member of the Dutch Reformed Church and he it's only with the pressure of the Dutch West India Company that he agrees to allow this diversity in part because many of the investors in the company itself are from a broad range of religious backgrounds they said we know you're our man over there you're going to have to listen to us and you're going to have to extend this toleration but to his dying day he grumbled about all the diversity one of the people who pushback against him is Adrienne van der Donck van der Donck was a well-educated man from the Netherlands he sent over initially to sort of help establish the rule of law in the northern parts of the colony and he had studied men like Gradius right and his understanding of natural law in many ways can be seen as sort of a hesitate a little bit to say but sort of a proto and light and Ament right anticipating that the growth of enlightenment thinking and this idea of natural rights right that human beings have certain inherent rights right so he brings that idea over with him as he begins to try to establish legal foundations in New Netherlands he does this in many ways and ultimately to the great displeasure of Peter Stuyvesant van der Donck becomes one of his greatest critics so much so that Stuyvesant has him jailed because he's seen as a threat he just he's a threat to order and remember that was sort of Stuyvesant's charge as he was brought over impose order organization structure and when van der Donck is released he writes what's called the remonstrance of New Netherland he uses this this remonstrance drawing on this idea of natural rights of the rule of law and ultimately after leaving prison travels back to the Netherlands to try to have Stuyvesant removed from his position and he actually is initially successful because he with the support of many of his fellow subjects make the case to the Dutch that Stuyvesant is sort of running the colony into the ground and that it will do better if they allow greater freedoms unfortunately for Van der Donck the first anglo-dutch war breaks out just as he's finally convinced the company to let him take over and he actually has the piece of paper in his hand removing Stuyvesant from power and is preparing to return to North America when the war breaks out the company revokes van der donks orders to remove Stuyvesant and Stuyvesant is left in control largely because the West India Company is concerned about the war and they know they're going to need a strongman there to sort of keep things moving in the correct direction it's in this time and Stuyvesant remains and he remains of in his same position that the city is is actually granted its first charter and it moves from being simply a company and some of this is the outgrowth of van der dongs efforts right that you have now not just a company town but an actual chartered city in New Amsterdam with in the Brid the Dutch Republic what's fascinating and here again you can see sort of some precursors to what we would think of as American ideals is that everyone in the town in the city of New Amsterdam is granted Burger status and this would in sort of the British tradition be called Freeman status right there are two classes there are great burgers and small burgers right I know he's sounds like we're ordering lunch now and the great burgers are those who have given larger amounts of money right right but here's a fascinating thing the small burger status is a relatively small amount of money right it's about 20 pounds of you can and you can pay and be repelled so you can pay in kind but you just have to pay some it's almost a token amount and as immigrants arrive from all over Europe primarily they were greeted with that opportunity and told if you can pay now you'll be granted small burger status immediately or you can pay it off over time and still have Burger status yes yeah you know this is not yet yeah yes I've there are a lot of things you sort of take for granted when you're talking about the 17th century so sexism is one of them but it's still a striking step forward from our perspective right so you have incredibly high rates of burger status we compare that with New England the the Freeman in New England never got much higher than 20% all right so there's that juxtaposition right things continue to get worse even after the first anglo-dutch war comes to an end tensions continue to rise in the Connecticut border Connecticut is granted its its own new charter and actually absorbs New Haven in 1661 under John Winthrop who is not the Massachusetts governor but his son in Connecticut and Winthrop gains this charter from the king and it grants him basically everything all the way to the Pacific Ocean within the connecticut boundaries which includes a good chunk of new york right this is why and this charter would would stay in effect well into the nineteenth century in terms of what Connecticut's land claims are this is why in Northeast Ohio you have Case Western Reserve University because what that part of what is today Ohio is Connecticut's Western Reserve so that that carries over this doesn't bode well for the Dutch because now Connecticut theoretically has right to come and take a good chunk of their land and they know this as tensions build however the King sort of trumps his own charter with with Winthrop and rege rants much of that land to his brother James the Duke of York right James sees what is happening in Connecticut and also wants greater control of British colonies in general and covets New Amsterdam and New Netherlands and so with that grant of 1664 from his brother he sends a fleet over to take New Amsterdam and New Netherlands from the Dutch when that happens Stuyvesant finds himself facing a British fleet or in English leave without any real support right so he stands there this fleet has shown up under authority from the King of England demanding the surrender of Fort Amsterdam and he's prepared to fight right he stands up on the walls of the fort he's ready to go and basically his population turns on him they say we're not going to fight we're not willing to risk our lives his own son signs the document saying that we don't want to fight they encourage him rather than engaging the British to surrender to avert misery sorrow and conflagration by surrendering to the English force because they know under the rules of war at that point in time that if they fire a single shot against the the the forces that are laying siege to them that the English forces have the right to go in and basically just burn the town to the ground so as soon as they fire they know it's over for them and so Stuyvesant's own son says don't do it so Stuyvesant recognizing that he has lost surrenders and you have about 1,500 residents of New Amsterdam at that point and they watch as Stuyvesant surrenders to Richard Nicholls who had been sent by the Duke of York to surrender to claim the fort for the English what's striking is that when Nicholls raises the English flag and renames a place in honor of his patron the Duke of York and Albany that the crowd includes a man named Anthony the Turk van Sally who's a half Moroccan former pirate who's now a wealthy landowner in in new Netherlands you have a sir levy who is a Polish Jew who owned Manhattan's first kosher butcher shop and and you have Manuel Garrett who is an African who owns a small farm on the edge of the city so even there in that moment as the surrender takes place you see the diversity I mean it's a small scale but it's there already right and these are people who recognize that it's in their best interest not to fight this is not an ideological endeavor it's pragmatic right in their resistance or in their decision not to resist the ruler right this I think provides a stark contrast with New England and with Virginia and I just quickly want to describe New England Virginia to come back to my larger larger point Puritan New England was just that right it was Puritan they believed themselves to be a chosen people they came over with their own established families their own established communities they saw themselves as providing an example right this is a city upon a hill stuff but that city upon a hill was a Puritan city upon a hill a Puritan example this is what happens when you let God's chosen people run things right you have a high literacy rate and people who can afford to be there they believed heavily in the family unit right as I mentioned they actually passed laws prohibiting living alone because the the family was so important right that if you have a young single man living by himself there's no telling what he can do but if he is in his father's house the father can keep control of things right marriage was a civil rather than a religious ceremony right it was all within sort of their own context so if you violate the contract divorce is fairly easy you see a lot of New England newspapers that say you know my husband not having been in my bed for three years I now declare myself divorced right so these are the kinds of things you would see they were they were clothes built towns right centered on the town green and it was about a communitarian sort of collective it wasn't simple majoritarian democracy you generally didn't have Democratic votes in these New England town meetings it was sort of just the will of the town that's how they often wrote it right it is the will of the town that this happened they didn't tell you that the vote was fifty one forty nine or something like that right and this is different and I this is David Hackett Fischer has written a book called Albion seed and he takes these ideas from you know what these places are right so what he says in New England is that they have an ordered Liberty this is their concept of Liberty the collective obligation to protect the individual from the tyranny of circumstance right basically nobody should get stuck with bad luck all right if something bad happens the community should come out to help them right they voted to tax themselves at higher rates to make this a reality right this was not seen right depending on your political persuasion this is socials might as well fair but this is this is a freedom from fear right this idea that you know that something bad happens there's somebody there to catch you to take care of you right but this in a lot of ways is different then you know you might say America is today right or wrong but it's different right Virginia is also a very different place on doing this to provide a juxtaposition right the Virginia culture and again this is this as much of this as David Hackett Fisher's on New England Virginia when William Barclay arrived in 1642 he remade Virginia into his image and really what he's doing is bringing royalist elites who had lost the English Civil War to come over and try to sort of recreate England abroad right they wanted to maintain the class system they imported indentured servants to work in the fields excuse me later of course they would begin to use slaves all of this was to maintain that core identity right with themselves these nobility at the top right and of course it's the King supporters who call themselves the Cavaliers who come over and settle Virginia and why today the University of Virginia is still the Cavaliers the Anglican faith as you might expect dominated political life as much as the Puritan faith dominated in New England the Anglicans dominated in Virginia right Quakers and Puritans were actually banished from Virginia and this they kept them out basically until the great awakening of the 1730's marriage was seen as a sacred Union divorce was nearly impossible it was a religious ceremony of massive feasts and about 20% of women were pregnant on on their wedding day as long as you were got married it's okay that's basically the way it worked they believed in education but only for the elite right not the general population and you can sort of see how the literacy rates play out right the further down you go the lower the literacy rate and what this comes to again from from Fisher is this idea of hegemonic liberty freedom this looks very I think foreign to us in a lot of ways freedom was the power to rule and not be overruled by others right freedom was power basically it was the opposite of slavery and it was a gift to the well-born Englishmen who were a breed apart the ones who could enslave others this is different than New England but both I think are very different than what you see in New York right what you see in New York and what you saw in New Amsterdam and New Netherlands was what I would call a pragmatic Liberty right this idea that Liberty came about as a response to changing circumstances to the sort of challenges of a republic to trying to manage different groups in the same place right that if you are going to have a republic in the form of the Dutch or if you are ultimately going to have a republic in the United States and I think Madison touches on this in Federalist 10 right when he said it says look faction is what's going to protect Liberty because you have all of these different groups competing for their interests and if you have so many different groups competing in one place it's going to help keep any one group from coming to dominate right and so this sort of pragmatic Liberty I think is a guiding piece of what you see in in the Netherlands what you see in New Amsterdam and I think what you ultimately see in much of the United States today right do you have religious toleration because there there you don't necessarily wholly agree but you tolerate them because they're a part of your place you have pluralism you see economics is driving much of this and you ultimately see balancing the needs of the community in face of a changing environment you see that in response to the various rulers in in the forms of the directors of New Netherlands you see it when the British arrive right there's a pragmatism there let's move beyond this doesn't matter who's in charge let's just keep running things and moving them forward and in fact the Dutch would come back and for about a year take back New Netherlands and then lose it again to the British but the city just kept on going the colony just kept on going because it was this sort of pragmatic approach to things that kept things moving and so what I think and then what I've argued here today or tried to argue is that what you end up with is this tradition built and growing out of the Dutch Republic formation that diversity in some ways leads to Liberty which allows for more diversity which allows for more liberty and that moving things forward requires a kind of pragmatism that would otherwise result in bloodshed and violence to try to sort of keep it under control and so what I want to leave you with and the note take a few questions is that what you get out of the Dutch tradition what you get from the history of New Amsterdam and and New Netherlands more broadly is this sort of pragmatic approach to running and allowing for liberty and well it's not the sole cause of who we've come to be as Americans I think it's a critical piece and a lesson that we've carried forward into the 21st century thank I know you mentioned slavery in Virginia yes but that's at slangs and yes they did yes from the very beginning yes and I glossed over it to a degree and this is in some ways a great omission that we often we often make and in my larger class I was try to come back and say look there's slavery there too the key piece and I think the critical factor in this is that you have these sort of societies with slaves rather than a slave Society New England and New York becomes when the great hubs actually the slave trade as does Rhode Island but it's not a place that sort of opens itself up to plantation agriculture so it's there and slavery is sort of never good in any form but it doesn't become sort of defining characteristic of the place whereas in the American South and certainly in the Caribbean both for the British for the French for the Dutch slavery dominates the Caribbean and this is where they're making most of their money for that for the empires but it's there it's just not sort of the foundational core of what these places are although they like I said both New England and New York make a lot of money out of the slave trade I think it is the Republican structure I gave you sort of a simplified version here and talking about the Empire and they did go through periods of struggle and strife and they got engaged in these wars and there were periods of less toleration and less Liberty but I think in sort of allowing for that diversity allowing for that sort of regional change allowed them sort of maintain that core and if you go by sort of classical political philosophy they were small enough to write the the sort of traditional view is small republics work best and this is what Madison is trying to turn on its head with the support for the Constitution is that you know a larger public can work but in some ways it might be their size as well just finished reading with a class the Second Treatise of government by Jeff Locke and although I knew he was in the Netherlands just before he publishes though I had never asked myself an IEP so I'm asking you if it's a little off the topic but with so much emphasis on trade and toleration those are the two driving things and with a central focus on property of the Second Treatise and then the letter on raishin yeah is there do you know of any evidence that he was influenced by the Dutch because he was living there great person tried to get an extra diet but yeah I mean I don't know of any sort I can't point to something and say here it is but if you look at so the stuff that's going on with with Gradius and this idea of you have these ideas are already sort of floating around right van der Donck is sort of immersed in these ideas and I would imagine that lockers are drawing on these same same connections you know and this is that we decided discussion yesterday in my American Revolution class or Thursday in my American Revolution class talking about the fact that Jefferson so drawing and all of these things are already there so it's it's there if you're an educated person you're getting exposed these ideas or getting engaged in these conversations continuing off the point the yep and about that time or maybe a generation after cousin Adam active movement to South Africa what was the motivation for that in world war that was such a denial of the Liberty that they were so committed and that I don't know I don't know the Dutch history well enough to sort of talk about their expansion into in temperament I think some of it may just been competition within within Europe and this idea that Africa doesn't count right if if Africa is then divided up among the Europeans a little bit later it's done with this idea that Africa isn't worthy of this consideration and what's interesting is the two places that gift to get left alone in the 19th century partitioning of Africa are Ethiopia because they believe they have a Christian King and Liberia because it was an American slate where X slaves could go for freedom so I think it must have been tie and I don't know for sure to this notion that you know where they're Christian it's fine whether or not it doesn't count but that's that like I said I'm just speculating and sloppy in America why do you feel this critical Dutch component has been sort of lost nor pedagogy and like why you know Gradius drawing on him why is that not really taught in our canon because they lost that's no it's it's oh sure why isn't this sort of part of our standard narrative right what why don't the Dutch get as much credit as they do you have New Englanders who are sort of the earliest right you have john adams grandson writing this history and well who's going to be the hero of this story right it's New Englanders who are the first to sort of write the history of America and so well it's New England then that's the center of all of this right that's it's our that's where we're coming from and so it's in a lot of ways question about who's writing the other issue too is the issue of sources the Dutch sources are only just in the last generation starting to be translated into accessible ink well English for scholars and this makes a big difference so that's part of it too I think probably I mean right he comes out and says that look they're very similar it's the same kind of place so that that's probably part of it as well I also cheated a little bit make one final point Pennsylvania right I mean the Quakers come over and they use this idea of religious toleration right they have their frame of government that says yeah come on over and so in a lot of ways Pennsylvania is a part of this as well right and the middle colonies together collectively become sort of this this place where all of this sort of mixes mixes together although the Quakers were a little less I mean Stuyvesant didn't like this toleration but everybody else are said this how it has to be the Quakers allowed for the toleration because they were waiting for the day when everybody said oh wait I should be a Quaker but you couldn't force them to do it right so it's a slightly different impulse behind the two but that I wanted to make that copy it because Pennsylvania is as much a part of this sort of middle colony Liberty I think as as New York is talk a little bit more about dogmatism and how was this a very American idea or habit and how does it connect perhaps with Laurel ISM I mean I think in the context of the Dutch that's that's exactly what pluralism was it was pragmatic because you had these different groups coming in they contributed the economy they were investing in things like the West India Company it just made sense to do it in the case of what became New York look we don't like this governor fighting the Indians because it's hurting our business so you know let's let's get him out well the British are here well does it make more sense to fight or just to say come on take over and we'll continue on doing what we're doing so I think it fits then and I think today when we do things well as a country I think it's when we understand the context of what's happening and don't just say well this is the way we do wit so this is what's going to happen it's when you take in all the information to make an informed choice that I think things work work the best one time about 20 years drive down to Penn State on NPR I can't give you the source fella said that the success of our democracy is attributed to the fact that the original England wanted everybody to be able to read the Bible so the fact that they have where they had to become literate on that basis that's the reason yes and that's that's part of and I don't deny this sort of the value of New England and certainly this is the cradle of the revolution and I think education is a key piece to this so I think the sort of New England literacy rates which which there were because they wanted to sort of be this example to the world so everybody should should learn to read I think that is a key piece of what America became I mean you wouldn't have the you wouldn't have John Adams without that sort of commitment and the Adams family is sort of a sort of luminary families in American history and it's it comes right out of that tradition so I think that's that's probably part of it but I would argue that you need this part of it as well to sort of bring it all together and it's that diversity that's allowed for the pluralism and the pragmatism of American history Josh comes to other places in the colonies besides New York interesting not to have had that kind of influence particularly right yeah and and later you would have them and you had a lot going to the Caribbean but but the government of these other places was explicitly controlled by primarily weather Puritans or Anglicans or even Quakers in Pennsylvania so you have influence in the frontier and these kinds of things but not at the same level where they're sort of saying here's the policy for this this region you you still had Dutch coming but not in the same not in the same way they're also in touch on this loanwords right things the idea of a cookie is a Dutch word that's why I don't call them biscuits Santa Claus was originally a Dutch character who has sort of become greater for us the idea of a boss rather than a master and Americans took boss to mean something very different than masters you get into the Revolutionary period and later right that you have a boss but he's not your master Americans have made that that differentiation for the economic consequences of the judge losing yeah for the Dutch yeah I don't fully know how much that impacted them it certainly would have been a blow but they had such wide-ranging colonies they had other places to make money from the other pieces they kept their Caribbean their Caribbean colonies and that's where the real money for everybody is coming from because that's where the great wealth is that's interesting you bring that up because they need Shaw and they a vampire contrasts the way in which for example the Dutch and the British maintained their empires if you think about it the pragmatism of the Dutch with this since it was a very different type of colonial experience what the British India so it's a very interesting kind of contrast and it I think complements quite well with yours which are presenting here of course is a broken girl we remember the Dutch platform yes of course especially in Brooklyn all right I think we should stop there thank you very much thank you beginning to our American the world and thank you so much very illuminating yeah we can take a coffee break now and we'll be back with the next next lecture in about 20 minutes

Channel: The University of Scranton

Views: 79,529

Keywords: Schemel Forum, University for a Day, American Pluralism, New Amsterdam, Dutch colony, University of Scranton

Id: Tbr0vvzy4Us

Length: 47min 57sec (2877 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 27 2015