Foreword: Answering the questions in New York City’s history

New Amsterdam’s earliest years remain shrouded in mystery. The infamous Peter Schagen letter from Nov. 7, 1626, reported that the Dutch West India Company had purchased Manhattan for the value of 60 guilders. But if documents are the tools of the historian’s trade, we lack for many that would help us tell the city’s earliest history. Surviving records produced within the colony of New Netherland begin in 1638, slightly more than a decade after the purchase and first European settlement. Much of the archive of the Dutch West India Company was deemed useless and sold for scrap paper in the 19th century.

As the 400th anniversary of New Amsterdam approaches, it seems clear, then, that the city’s earliest inhabitants and even later observers had little notion that they were or had been engaged in a momentous venture. Looking back from the vantage of the 20th and 21st centuries, however, many have offered arguments for New Amsterdam’s significance. Perhaps it was the site of the first stirrings of American independence when, in 1653, the city fought the West India Company to receive its first court. Others have posited that the city’s legacy is diversity and toleration, and still others see the city’s merchants and trade as its defining legacy.

While the West India Company’s records of the colony of New Netherland are relatively plentiful after 1638, the unique, authoritative voice of the city of New Amsterdam begins in the historical record in 1653 with the start of its court under the leadership of a mayor and aldermen selected from the city’s population.

These original records of New Amsterdam can still be seen – and read, if one knows Dutch – at New York City’s Municipal Archives. Each generation brings new questions to the four centuries old records of New Netherland and New Amsterdam. At the New Netherland Institute, we are still learning new things about the past because they survived and are preserved and because we make gains in increasing their accessibility through translation and digitization. Let us look forward to another 400 years of answering the questions in New York City’s history.