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The John Batchelor Show

6/8: Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America Hardcover – March 4, 2025 by Russell Shorto (Author)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

News, Books, Society & Culture, Arts

4.62.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

6/8: Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America Hardcover – March 4, 2025 
by  Russell Shorto  (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Manhattan-Extraordinary-Created-America/dp/0393881164/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0
The author of The Island at the Center of the World offers up a thrilling narrative of how New York―that brash, bold, archetypal city―came to be.

In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general.
Bristling with vibrant characters, Taking Manhattan reveals the founding of New York to be an invention, the result of creative negotiations that would blend the multiethnic, capitalistic society of New Amsterdam with the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery. The book draws from newly translated materials and illuminates neglected histories―of religious refugees, Indigenous tribes, and free and enslaved Africans.
Taking Manhattan tells the riveting story of the birth of New York City as a center of capitalism and pluralism, a foundation from which America would rise. It also shows how the paradox of New York’s origins―boundless opportunity coupled with subjugation and displacement―reflects America’s promise and failure to this day. Russell Shorto, whose work has been described as “astonishing” (New York Times) and “literary alchemy” (Chicago Tribune), has once again mined archival sources to offer a vibrant tale and a fresh and trenchant argument about American beginnings.

1671 NEW JERSEY, PENNSYLVANIA



Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm John Batchel, visiting with the author Russell Shorto, his new book, Taking Manhattan.

0:06.0

Everything you don't know about Manhattan and where it came from, especially the naming part.

0:12.0

The extraordinary events that created New York and shaped America.

0:15.0

New Amsterdam. It's at the base of what it will become called Manhattan Island.

0:20.0

And Richard Nichols is now

0:24.0

the governor so-called but Peter Stuyveson and the council of the city are

0:31.3

there with him and they're working together the naming is everything how did it

0:36.8

come to be New York, given that the York was the Duke of York,

0:43.4

and that was James, who would cause enormous amounts of trouble and anxiety for the English in a few years' time, and the Dutch would be dominant for a few more wars.

0:57.7

So how is it New York?

1:00.0

Well, according to this agreement, it would become English.

1:03.4

It would change hands, which meant renaming.

1:07.7

Nichols, much was left in his hands, including what to call the place.

1:13.6

So James was the Duke of York.

1:16.6

He was also the Duke of Albany and he was the Earl of Ulster.

1:20.6

Nichols could, no one had given him instructions.

1:23.6

So in a letter home to the Duke of York, at one point, almost as a throwaway, he says,

1:29.7

oh, and I named this place New York.

1:32.3

So he just chose one of the titles and decided what to call it.

1:36.3

And again, you know, Nichols in so many ways shapes not just the city, but American colonial history and therefore the shape of how America

1:48.1

would develop. Not just naming of New York, but he decides. So New Amsterdam had been just

1:54.3

what is now the financial district, this little tip of Manhattan Island. Nichols decides Manhattan Island itself, the whole, whatever it is 12 miles long,

...

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