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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Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci · You Can't Understand America Without Understanding New York - Russell Shorto · 9 Jun 2026 podcast

And the Dutch, wherever they went in the world,

water was your highway that's how you got around so they looked at the world in terms of waterways and they understood very quickly that you have this world-class harbor and you've got this river the hudson river that cuts up into the northward into the continent and then it intersects with the mohawk river which goes all the way to the great lakes so they

This is in the 1600s, but they were already dreaming of how do we access this continent?

We don't have highways.

How do we get there?

That's how they thought ultimately they were going to get there.

And when people in the colony were writing to the home country saying, look, you have to send more support to us.

You have to send soldiers.

We need to reinforce this settlement.

um this is what they had in mind that ultimately they could exploit this this whole continent and had they uh been successful in that obviously you know you and i would be speaking dutch right now but um that didn't happen and so geography was one part of it and the other part as i said a couple minutes ago uh was what the dutch brought this trading sensibility and this relative openness relative tolerance um willing willingness to to kind of

learn different languages in order to get ahead.

So that's what sets up this showdown.

And that's what, when Richard Nichols, who is the head of the English expedition that comes sailing into the harbor to take over this colony, he doesn't, I think, understand what all this is because this was new stuff.

You know, at the time, the idea was intolerance was common sense.

you know, to try to tolerate different people of different religions.

Religion was very divisive.

You didn't do that.

You know, what you wanted was one people speaking one language and worshiping one religion.

But yet here were the Dutch in the home country and also on Manhattan.

Turning that on its head and having this incredibly vibrant society.

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