People of New Amsterdam
New York City is built on the legacies of the people who have lived, worked, and traded in this region for thousands of years. The profiles below showcase individuals from the Dutch New Amsterdam period. some of whom are featured in the Museum of the City of New York's exhibition New York at Its Core. Their stories provide insights into the histories of trade, politics, slavery, gender roles, and ecology in the region. Accompanying insights from scholars provide additional context for the forces shaping the lives of these individuals and address the legacies of the colonial period for today.
The Lenape of the 17th century lived where their predecessors had for at least 6,000 years, and the region known today as Lenapehoking was a complex landscape of trade, politics, and resource management. In 1609, English explorer Henry Hudson, working for a Dutch company, sailed into New York Bay and found the homeland of the Lenape. Recognizing the natural resources of the area, a land rich with furs, fish, and plants, he immediately laid claim to the Lenape territory for his employers. In 1624 a new firm, the Dutch West India Company, sent European traders and settlers to cash in on the colony’s potential by trading with the Lenape and other Indigenous nations. By 1628, 270 European colonists and enslaved Africans brought over by the West India Company had built the town of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan as the capital of the colony of New Netherland. By 1664, the village of New Amsterdam was a settlement of 1,500 people who reportedly spoke 18 languages, making it one of the world’s most diverse places.
Profiles
Peter Minuit
Peter (Pierre) Minuit (c. 1590-1638) was born in the German town of Wesel. His parents were Walloon (or French-speaking Protestant) refugees who had fled the southern Netherlands when the political situation had become unfriendly to Protestants under Catholic Spain.
Cornelis Steenwijk
Cornelis Steenwijk (1626-1681) was one of those merchants, and he used the colony’s opportunities for economic advancement to secure a level of social and political status that would not have been open to him back in the Dutch Republic.
Penhawitz
Penhawitz (d.1643) was one of the most influential sachems, or indigenous leaders, who in the early 17th century lived in Lenapehoking, a Lenape term for the ancestral lands that included large parts of Manhattan Island, Long Island, the lower Hudson Valley, and the upper Delaware Valley.
Sara Kierstede
Sara Kierstede was a woman of Scandinavian descent who served as a translator for Dutch negotiations with Indigenous communities in New Amsterdam.
Juan Rodriguez
Juan Rodriguez was a Black or mixed-race man from Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic) who is considered the first non-Native person to have resided in the area that would later be called New Amsterdam.
Reytory Angola
Enslaved Africans began to arrive on Manhattan Island not long after the first Dutch structures rose from the ground in 1624. The West India Company (WIC) shipped enslaved men to the colony for the express purpose of building its infrastructure.
Petrus Stuyvesant
Petrus Stuyvesant is best known as New Netherland longest, most influential, and last Dutch governor, having served until the English overthrew the colony’s Dutch administration and renamed it New York in 1664.
Historians Q&A
Professor Susanah Shaw Romney
Susanah Romney is an Associate Professor in Early Dutch Empire and Women's and Gender History at New York University. She earned her Ph.D at Cornell University where she worked with historian Mary Beth Norton. She is currently working on a new project looking at gender, settlement, and land claims in seventeenth century Dutch empire in North America, Guyana, South Africa, and Java.
Professor Jeroen Dewulf
Jeroen Dewulf is Queen Beatrix Professor in Dutch Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he developed a new course on the Dutch history of New York that in 2012 was awarded the American Cultures Innovation in Teaching Award.
Professor Nicole Maskiell
Nicole Maskiell is a historian specializing in family slaveholding networks in Anglo-Dutch colonial America. Dr. Maskiell is an Assistant Professor of History, Director of Public History, and McClausland Faculty Fellow at the University of South Carolina.
Tom Weterings
Tom Weterings was born in the Netherlands and studied History at Leiden University and Dutch Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Originally focusing on the Middle Ages, he became interested in Dutch 17th-century colonial history, working mainly on transcription and translation of original Middle Dutch texts from the period.
