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
And I knew Peter Stuyvesant was the head of it.
And I knew he had a wooden leg and probably nothing else.
That was the extent of my information at the time.
But I was intrigued.
And I'm drawn to origin stories.
And so I asked friends who were historians of New York.
you know, what can I, where can I go?
And they bewildered and intrigued me that they, one after another, said, I don't know the Dutch period.
Until eventually somebody pointed me to a man named Charles Goering, who since 1974 had been translating and publishing the 12,000 pages of records of the Dutch settlement of Manhattan,
And I had a series of phone calls with him.
He was in Albany at the State Library.
And then he invited me up for his annual conference and I met all these people who were working in this field and eventually just hatched the idea that, you know, you could tell the story of American origins
just as easily and just as legitimately focusing on Lower Manhattan as you could from focusing on the Puritans and the Pilgrims and the English story.
Nobody knows.
That's the short answer.
But a lot of people, that's in sort of folk memory.
You come to me for the truth.
But a lot of other things, you know, you mentioned place names.
Brooklyn was originally Brooklyn, named after a Dutch city.
Staten Island was named after the Staten-General, the governing body of the Netherlands.
Showing 21–40 of 238 · page 2 of 12
← Previous
Next →