"…A Small Elderly Gentleman By the Name of Knickerbocker."

In her book Knickerbocker: The Myth behind New York — now available from Rutgers Univerity Press — author Elizabeth L. Bradley traces the use of Washington Irving's fictional historian Diedrich Knickerbocker — the crusty narrator of his 1809 satire A History of New York – as the embodiment of All Things New York.  Here's Bradley, in a recent piece in the New York Times:

Manhattanites knew little of their Dutch founding fathers, and Irving took advantage of that to create a past that interwove fac