New York

by Edward Rutherfurd

I have not used the name of Lenape to denote the native people of the Manhattan region. But in fact, this name was only applied to these groups at a later historical period, and so I have preferred not to make use of it when it would have signified nothing to the people described.

jerkin

Their country might be small, but the indomitable Netherlanders had stood up to the mighty, occupying Spanish Empire, and won their independence.

Walloons

ballast,

dispossessed

dominies

papist.”

Huguenots,

“Methodists.”

As usual, when huge trading enterprises mismanage their affairs, the company turned to the government to bail them out. The solution suggested was to dump the tea on the large American market.

He realized that, like many women, she planned to refashion the man she loved, and it quite amused him.

sanguine.

“But the political art uses negotiation and compromise rather than logic. The question is not whether the British Empire makes sense, but whether men can live together in it.

“The British are angry. When people are angry, any insult will do; and prejudice is magnified into a cause.” “I had not understood British arrogance, either.” “All empires become arrogant. It is their nature.”

There were only a few people on Bowling Green, and it was easy to entertain little Weston. James had taught him to throw and catch a ball, and all you had to do was throw the ball to him by the hour. “Throw higher,” he would cry, or, “Further away.”

“What is it you want to create? A republic?” “Yes. A free republic.” “Be careful what you wish for, James. You have been to Oxford and know more history than I. Didn’t the stern Roman Republic fall into decadence? And in England, after they cut off King Charles’s head, Cromwell’s rule turned into such a dictatorship that the English brought back the monarchy again.”

bivouac,

Gallic

fo’c’sle.

John Paul Jones,

parapet.

The general was to be given a banquet at Fraunces Tavern,

coxcomb.

“You can do what you like, sir,” he cried, “but I’ll tell you this. New York is the true capital of America. Every New Yorker knows it, and by God, we always shall.”

And each year, the great grid of New York extended further—as if some giant, with a mighty hand, was planting rows of houses every season.

You couldn’t deny the genius of Tammany Hall. Fifty years ago, that wretch Aaron Burr had built up Tammany as a political power to get himself elected vice president.

She loved Central Park. It was only a few years since the great, two-and-a-half-mile rectangle had been laid out to the inspired design of Olmstead and Vaux, to provide a much needed breathing space, the “lungs” in the middle of what would clearly, one day, be the city’s completed grid.

habeas corpus.

For some reason, she always seemed to think best when she was wearing her pearls.

obdurate.

In the end, it was Germany that brought America into the war. Up until recently Wilson, trying to keep his country neutral, had managed to handle the Germans. When their submarines sank the Lusitania with Americans on board, he’d protested, and the German high command had stopped the submarine war. Now, however, everything had changed. The Germans had behaved abominably: seeing Russia collapsing into chaos, and the British nearly starving, they had concluded that they could win the war with a final push. Suddenly, German submarines had gone into action again. “Since your ships carry food to the British,” Germany told President Wilson, “we’ll torpedo any American vessel on the seas.” In an astounding insult to the United States, German representatives even told Mexico: “Attack America, and we’ll help you take back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.” It had to be war after that. The

Stieglitz.”

Suddenly, a crowd of artists with huge, bold abstract work, unlike anything seen before, had burst upon the New York scene. Jackson Pollock, Hedda Sterne, Barnett Newman, Motherwell, de Kooning, Rothko—“the Irascibles,” people often called them. The name of their school: Abstract Expressionism. Modern America had an art that was all its own. And at the center of it all was a small, indefatigable lady, born into the world of New York private schools, and summers in Newport, but who preferred the company of the most daring artists of her time: Betty Parsons. And her gallery, of course.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri was a short, fast-paced novel by James Michener about the recent Korean War.

Not many people remembered that the first European to arrive in New York harbor, way back in the early sixteenth century, had been the Italian Verrazano. Everybody knew Hudson, though he’d actually got there more than eighty years later, but Verrazano was forgotten; and for years the leaders of the Italian community had been lobbying for recognition of the great navigator. When a vast bridge was finally constructed across the entrance to New York harbor, the Italians wanted it named after him. Robert Moses had opposed the name, but the Italians lobbied Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and finally got their way. And it was fitting that the great suspension bridge, joining Staten Island to Brooklyn, should bear an Italian name. For it was one of the most elegant bridges ever built.