Taking Manhattan Quotes

“isn’t the combination of pluralism and capitalism the glue that holds all modern cities together?”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“the country’s history came into being in New York in the 1730s, as did the concept of freedom of the press. Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar, the editors of Empire City, a collection of writings about New York, ask, “Is it a coincidence that the American Communist Party, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the gay rights movement all started in the city?”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“New York became a merger of Dutch and English elements on American shores, the Glorious Revolution fused Dutchness and Englishness in England itself and in ways that English history has never truly come to terms with. Put another way, if the Dutch city of New Amsterdam became English in 1664, a quarter of a century later England itself became, in a sense, Dutch.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“When the Bank of England was established in 1694, it capped a transformation of the English system of finance along Dutch lines. Methods the Dutch had long used to finance their government and build their empire became English. The success of the British Empire that was to come, many historians assert, rests in no small part on this Dutch base.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Americans today are slowly coming to realize that New York was a major hub of the slave trade. We may still associate the institution with the southern states, but it was so much a part of the economy and way of life of New York in the city’s first century and a half that by 1730 some 42 percent of families in the city owned slaves.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“In England people smarted at the loss, but they had other calamities to deal with as well. The first year of the war coincided with the return of the bubonic plague to London, which arrived with unimaginable intensity.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Johan de Witt had one of the most brilliant minds of his age. He wrote the first textbook of analytic geometry and devised the first accurate actuarial tables.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“The pluralistic and capitalistic features of New York had their origins in the Dutch colony, and both of those elements of the city were reconfigured and invigorated when the Dutch and English strains merged.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“New York is often thought of as the archetypal modern metropolis. Two features of such a metropolis stand out. It is pluralistic—not made up of one dominant ethnic group but rather built around, and deriving energy from, its diverse population.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“But then came that tantalizing, critical, stop-you-in-your-tracks word: however. As howevers go, this one altered not only the course of the confrontation but of history itself.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“the first and perhaps only woman to found a town in colonial America.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Gravesend was part of the Dutch colony but had English roots and mostly English inhabitants. It had been settled two decades earlier by Lady Deborah Moody, an English noblewoman who had emigrated to Massachusetts in 1639 in”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Outsiders had a hard time fathoming that a multiethnic population could be a strength. New Amsterdam was a trading center whose inhabitants had family and business ties in far-flung places.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“They took side trips to Delft to see the tomb of William the Silent, the founder of the modern Dutch Republic.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“of the most famous residents of New Netherland—Lady Deborah Moody and Anne Hutchinson—fled New England Puritanism and became beneficiaries of the Dutch policy of religious toleration.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“In an age in which Europe was awash in religious warfare—when intolerance was official policy in Spain, France, and England; when European armies were slaughtering one another over doctrinal religious disputes—the Dutch determined that they should tolerate those who believed differently.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“toleration that came into being in the Dutch Republic was surely quite narrow.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“A contemporary French poet penned the fairly straightforward lines, “And it is well known that the King of England / Fucks the Duke of Buckingham.”)”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“For an unassuming town, Ampthill has managed to ensnare itself in a good many historical events over the centuries, several of which are reflected in the church.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“He turned a mission of revenge against the Pequots, over the murder of a Puritan, into a bloody war that nearly wiped out the tribe and became a defining event in relations between Europeans and Native Americans.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Endecott, the governor of the colony, was an Ur-Puritan.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“The Puritans were aggressively intolerant of other faiths, and their yearning for political independence was not in the name of “life, liberty,”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Maverick had been among the first English to come to Massachusetts, arriving in about 1623, before the Puritans.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Two contradictions in particular governed Boston as it grew. It was founded on Christian notions of peace and piety, yet thirty years earlier the Puritans had all but annihilated the Pequot tribe and then set up an income stream by extorting other Indigenous peoples, making them pay “tribute” in exchange for not murdering them.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“There are few indications in the records that Stuyvesant or any of the other leaders of New Netherland harbored moral objections to developing such a trade. The tolerance for which the Dutch have been praised, while real, was mostly for white European Christians and to a lesser extent Jews. It certainly didn’t apply to Africans or Native Americans.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“It might be constructive instead to envision dozens of tribes in the northeastern portion of the future United States, speaking a variety of languages, worshipping a panoply of gods, and holding various beliefs about their people, the creation of the world, the meaning of life. Some”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“The sense that what the Dutch brought to Manhattan Island is inconsequential, that the history of this place only truly began once the English took the reins, can begin to be dispelled by looking around New Amsterdam.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Water was the reason for valuing this place before any Europeans arrived. Water was and is the primary element in Lenape culture.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“Anthony van Salee was apparently born in Spain to a Dutch pirate father and a Moorish mother. Griet Reyniers was a German or Dutch prostitute. They met and married in Amsterdam, then emigrated to Manhattan, where between the two of them they racked up fifteen court appearances in a two-year period, for drunkenness, fighting, slander, and the time a group of sailors called Griet a whore and she responded by baring her bottom and crying, “Blaes mij daer achterin!” which could loosely translate to “Kiss me back there!” But just when we might expect to see the couple fall through the cracks of the records and into oblivion, they find their footing in society. They become prominent landholders. Their children married into the elite, and their progeny stayed there, with descendants who would include Warren G. Harding and Cornelius Vanderbilt.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“As Michaeline Picaro said to me of her community, “We’re still digging out from the rubble of what happened four centuries ago.”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America