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

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 5 April 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

8/8: 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.

1640 NEW AMSTERDAM

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm John Battsu with Russell Shorto. The book is Taking Manhattan.
0:04.0	The story continues the third Dutch English war, and there's an enormous battle in 72, I believe,
0:12.0	and we lose Richard Nichols. At the same time, it introduces the drama that will become the glorious revolution.
0:21.6	Now there's some twists and turns here, but remember it's a detail that's important
0:26.6	about how the English Protestants worried that James was vulnerable to Catholicism because of his mother.
0:34.6	One day, and I believe it's, well, the date of Charles II's death,
0:42.1	can you help me, Russell? I'm sorry, the date of what, John? Charles the second's death. He dies.
0:49.1	1685. Right. When the brother dies, James ascends to the throne, and therein lies the problem. And the whole of the island is now in anxiety that there's going to be another civil war, especially when the birth of the king's first child by his, I believe, French wife, is a boy.
1:13.8	And what does this mean to the English Protestant Russell?
1:19.0	James is Catholic.
1:20.9	So the British populace has to swallow that.
1:25.4	Okay, we have a Catholic monarch. Then the birth of a son means,
1:30.3	oh my God, we're going to have another, we're going to have Catholic kings forever. So,
1:35.3	and Catholicism was, you know, really anathema to the most British people. So that sets off this crisis within the colony or within the country that is
1:46.0	very complicated. And the one way of understanding it is that a lot of people wanted,
1:56.0	we have to get him out and we need a new king. The way English history has spun it, what happens next is they invited the Dutch aristocrat, the stadtholder, of the Netherlands, Vilum, to take over the throne.
2:18.3	Now, invitation is a strange word to use for what was truly an invasion.
2:25.3	So the Dutch and the English, of course, have had this history that we've been talking about for the past hour.
2:31.3	They are often at one another's throats. And here is a moment when
2:37.0	Villeem strategically says, you know, I can take this. I can take the whole thing. So the
2:44.0	huge irony in the whole story of the English taking of Manhattan and taking this Dutch colony, which is,
2:52.5	after all, it's a little colony way over in North America that hasn't been developed too
	...

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