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.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Bushwick was once Boswijk.

Flatbush was once Flakkebos.

These are all Dutch names.

Coney Island was named for the Coney's.

That's the Dutch word for rabbits.

There was once a lot of rabbits there.

So, you know, these inheritances go on and on.

The American Santa Claus comes from Sinterklaas, the Dutch version.

And that came about in the 1700s when you had all these now English families in New York and they their children.

kind of were jealous of the Dutch children who got presents from Sinterklaas.

So, you know, all these inheritances, you know, you can track them.

And Jan Kees is maybe one of those.

So this book, Taking Manhattan, is about, it's a kind of sequel to, you mentioned my earlier book, The Island at the Center of the World.

The earlier book tells the story of the Dutch colony, which existed for 40 years.

So the colony was called New Netherland, and it was very extensive.

It covered much of New York and New Jersey, some of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, went down to Delaware.

And the capital of New Amsterdam was at the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

And as I laid out in that earlier book, it was quite consequential.

And in shorthand terms, what the Dutch did was they pioneered at this time in the 1600s pluralism and with that religious tolerance.

So because you tolerate different religions, you have people speaking different languages and so on.

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