New York History Summer / Fall 2015© 2015 by The New York State Historical Association 261 Editors’ Introduction D.L. Noorlander, Thomas Beal, Susan Goodier New York History has been an important forum for reflective essays and original research on New Netherland and Dutch New York for many years. The New Netherland Institute currently lists in its online bibliography at least twenty-six articles that this journal published between the 1970s and today.1 Among them we find, for example, David Steven Cohen’s influential essay on the colony’s ethnic makeup, “How Dutch were the Dutch of New Netherland?” (1981), and Joyce Goodfriend’s excellent historiographic essay, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History” (1999).2 More recently, New York History commemorated the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s 1609 voyage with a special issue dedicated to Dutch topics. And in 2014 the Editors organized a panel of seven experts from across the United States and Canada for our first-ever roundtable discussion on the current state of New Netherland studies.3 In this issue we continue our long-time commitment to Dutch American scholarship with twice the usual content: seven essays, plus book reviews, an exhibit review, and a glossary of potentially-confusing Dutch terms. The issue opens with an essay by Jeroen van den Hurk, who writes about early Dutch activities on Manhattan Island in “Plan Versus Execution: The ‘Ideal City’ of New Amsterdam.” Van den Hurk examines the history of European town planning and how the Dutch West India Company drew on various influences from the Italian, Dutch, 1. The NNI bibliography is not comprehensive. It is missing, for example, Irmgard Carras, “Who Cared? The Poor in 17th-Century New Amsterdam, 1628–1664,” New York History 85, no. 3 (Summer 2004), 247–263, and Noah Gelfand, “A Transatlantic Approach to Understanding the Formation of a Jewish Community in New Netherland and New York,” New York History 89, no. 4 (Fall 2008), 375–395. A thorough comparison would probably turn up more missing titles. See http://www.newnetherlandinstitute .org/research/new-netherland-bibliography/ (accessed February 18, 2016). 2. David Steven Cohen, “How Dutch Were the Dutch of New Netherland?” New York History 62, no. 1 (Jan. 1981): 49–60; Joyce Goodfriend, “Writing/Righting Dutch Colonial History,” New York History 80, no. 1 (Jan. 1999): 5–28. 3. The special Dutch issue was vol. 89, no. 4 (Fall 2008). See also “Roundtable: The Past, Present, and Future of New Netherland Studies,” New York History 95, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 446–490. 262 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY and Spanish worlds to design a colonial capital that did not, in the end, resemble the original schemes and proposals. The next three essays describe religious and social developments somewhat later in the colony’s history. In “‘Hot Pestilential and Unheard-Of Fevers, Illnesses, and Torments’: Days of Fasting and Prayer in New Netherland,” Jaap Jacobs uses Peter Stuyvesant’s proclamations about fast and prayer days to explore the events and developments that colonists believed to be especially important. Jacobs also argues that fast and prayer days were not strictly Calvinist in nature. Rather, they built on a widespread belief in divine providence and fostered a kind of non-denominational, civic religion. Harm Zwarts writes about religion and the economy in “Reformed Deaconries as Providers of Credit in Dutch Settlements.” The deaconries did not have access to the same investment opportunities as their counterparts in Europe, Zwarts shows, but by lending money to colonists they created their own markets and grew their funds gradually through the receipt of interest payments. In Zwarts’s account, the deaconry serves to illustrate, on the one hand, the successful recreation of Dutch institutions in America, and on the other, the need for flexibility and adaptation in a colonial setting . Deacons sometimes used their funds on behalf of poor widows, who are also the main topic of the next essay, “‘Her Humble Estate’: Poverty and Widowhood in Seventeenth-Century New York,” by Abby Shelton. Shelton uses colonial court records to study the experiences of three different women, all widows, who did not have the resources and family networks to support themselves after the death of a husband. Despite some legal and...
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Mar 28, 2024
Heghine Hakobyan 
Open Access
