I’ve been to Amsterdam, and other cities in the Netherlands. Walking down their streets, alongside and over their canals, clicking cobblestones and ambling into seven century old sanctuaries — this brings Dutch history to life. It is not so easy, there, to ignore the people who built this and lived it — the people who came before and whose inheritance, many centuries deep, remains for all to enjoy.

I have not yet been to New York, where the once New Amsterdam developed into one of the greatest of new world cities. But I am about to go, and during our weeklong trip there we plan to wander its streets and enter its monuments in search of its people — the beating heart of America. We will not be visiting a Mamdani grocery store or the Trump Tower — we’d like to dive deeper than that. But we will be hard put to dredge down much more deeply than a couple of centuries (or so).

Modern culture, heavily shaped by new world sensibilities, is OK with this — it’s quite happy to live in the moment and give history short shrift. But New York’s cultural foundations lie deep, and I intend, at the very least, to be aware of those foundations as I walk the streets above. I will be on the lookout for New Amsterdam.

Most everybody knows the origins of New York — the New Amsterdam within a New Netherland. But that Dutch claim only lasted forty years (1624 – 1664) before the fledgling city lost its name and morphed into New York. This origin quickly became a forgotten footnote in popular history (especially the American kind). The Dutch, no doubt, were not so ready to forget, and this Dutch Canadian is now eager to explore.

It was satisfying read and a nice addition to my smattering of history books. The work is based on archives gathered and translated by Charles Gehring starting in 1974. Russell Shorto has spun the details into an engaging story spanning two continents and half a century, full of characters, intrigue and historical detail. The book became a best seller and won multiple awards.

That wealth of details has blurred in my mind by now, but the book’s historical thrust and sociological conclusions have stayed with me. I can’t begin to replicate the effect here, but I will share just a few quotes before making some observations.

Rooted, as I am, in north-east Netherlands, I’m aware of the difference between Amsterdam’s golden age and the reality of not so golden rural life. Yet there are qualities of temperament and ideals that permeated Dutch society as a whole, which would have carried over to the New World along with the Dutch West India Company’s city dwellers and country ‘patroons’.

Primary among these qualities is tolerance. A huge influx of refugees into Holland, beginning around 1585, mixed things up considerably. And in the trade ports and hubs like Amsterdam, the presence of traders from all over was taken for granted. Dutch entrepreneurial spirit valued cooperation more than dissent, even when beliefs clearly collided.

New Amsterdam was established by this trade network, so the new town inevitably became as cosmopolitan its mother city. This contrasted noticeably with the British and Puritan New England settlements up and down the Atlantic coast where control was tight, class was constrained and religion was rigid. Dutch tolerance extended to (social) messiness, a feature one might recognize from later layers of chaos in New York City. Freedom was more important than order, at least to a point.

The Dutch Republic was a decentralized union of chartered, trading cities, while England was much more centralized. So the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam expected as much when they were granted city rights by the Netherlands (1653) and were loathe to give up their rights when subsequent charters were issued by English and American governors (1686 and beyond).