:Crossing the Sound: The Rise of Atlantic American Communities in Seventeenth‐Century Eastern Long Island

Abstract

Historians of New England, New Netherland, and early New York all have had something to say about eastern Long Island, but almost always just in passing. The task of chronicling developments in this area off the coast of southern New England in the seventeenth century has, for the most part, fallen to local historians, who have examined fragments rather than framing a larger picture. In this slim volume, Faren R. Siminoff moves eastern Long Island to center stage and offers a unified account of its history during the first three quarters of the seventeenth century. Her purpose is not so much to fill a geographical gap in existing scholarship, although clearly she does so, as to make a bold claim for the significance of the “East End” in the creation and reproduction of Atlantic American communities. The premise of Siminoff's work is the obsolescence of the standard narrative of English appropriation of Native lands and erasure of Native influences in tandem with the creation of a society in southern New England that largely replicated old England. Jettisoning a nationalistic model with an assumption of domination and submission in favor of a more neutral Atlantic American framework in which outcomes are contingent, she proposes a version of the region's history that does not privilege any of the groups at the heart of the standard narrative—English, Dutch, and Natives—but instead casts them, or rather subgroups called “communities of interest,” as players in an ongoing and fertile series of negotiations over the structure and values of the new Atlantic American communities that emerged on Long Island in the aftermath of the Pequot War of 1637.