But it ought to be questioned. The original colonies were not all English, and the multiethnic makeup of the Manhattan colony is precisely the point. The fact that the Dutch once established a foothold in North America has been known all along, of course, but after noting it, the national myth of origin promptly dismisses it as irrelevant. It was small, it was short-lived, it was inconsequential. That wasn’t us, the subtext runs, but someone else, an alien mix of peoples—with strange customs and a different language—who appeared briefly and then vanished, leaving only traces. This is false.
