Russell Shorto
speaker
238 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 9 Jun
Russell Shorto’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Their models seemed to include the Bible and ancient Rome.
In both of those, you had slavery.
In neither one of those, interestingly, was it race-based.
You were enslaved if your town was conquered.
And in neither one of them was it a permanent institution.
You could get out of slavery too.
And in New Amsterdam, there are a number of instances when –
enslaved people petition for their freedom.
They go to court and they say, we've done our time.
We think we should be free.
And they are given their freedom along with land, not because the West India Company, which runs the colony, thinks that they deserve it or whatever, but because they need to support themselves somehow.
So, you know, it's a complicated story, which makes it, from my perspective, that much more interesting.
It's like, you know, we have these neat categories of what slavery is.
Well, not everywhere, not everywhere, and not at every time.
Yeah, well, you just said it, weaving a story.
I think of myself primarily as a storyteller.
And so my interest was, okay, what is the story of New York's roots?
And do we have enough information on the people who established it
to tell a big, full, rich, complicated story.
And once I met Charlie Gehring, who, by the way, retired last year after 51 years as translator, once I met him, and here was these thousands of pages of records, it's like, yes, we have the material.
Showing 181–200 of 238 · page 10 of 12
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