You Can't Understand America Without Understanding New York - Russell Shorto
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What historical significance does New Amsterdam hold for New York?
New York is still that. The irony of it is they started it, they put a little seed together, and this is the land of opportunity for so many different people. You know, when Mike Bloomberg was running the city, I sat on his financial services advisory board, and he once said to me, Anthony, it's not a city, it's an emerging nation. It's not a city, it's a laboratory experiment for diversity. Many of these traits, commerce, pluralism, ambition, pragmatism, they were all there, right? New York is just living out its original DNA. Is that fair to say?
I think so, yeah. It's like the acorn in the oak tree. If you looked at New Amsterdam, what it looked like, you know, it's this tiny little kind of wild west town with a couple of windmills and these rickety buildings and things. It bears no resemblance to New York City, but the genetic material was there.
Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Russell Shorto. He is a historian, journalist, and a bestselling author. It's not just this book, but other books. But the one we're going to be talking about today is Taking Manhattan, The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America. What a great book. And of course, you wrote Island at the Center of the World, which is If you ask my mom, Russell, this is the island at the center of the world. Everything about New York. And of course, I'm a big time New Yorker. I never left this. Don't ever expect to leave. I have no Florida real estate. And you give me a lot of reasons to love this city. But what a great origin story.
Now, you've spent... most of your career studying the origins of America, particularly through the lens of New York. But before we get to the book, can you tell us a little bit about your background and what drew you to this sort of history?
Sure. Well, first, thanks for having me on the show. And I share your mom's enthusiasm for the island center of the world, as do Knicks fans currently.
Amen.
So how did I get into this? I was living in New York City. This is going back 20-some years. And my... I lived in East Village. My daughter was a toddler. The nearest place for me to take her that she could run around and play was the churchyard of St. Mark's in the Bowery, which is at 10th Street and 2nd Avenue. And Peter Stuyvesant's tomb is there. That was once his family chapel. And there's a monument to him. And I knew New York had once been New Amsterdam. I knew it was founded by the Dutch. 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.
I mean, listen, it's fascinating. We still see remnants of the Dutch culture here in Amsterdam Avenue or Stuyvesant Town and the different things. There's a debate going on in my family, and I was hoping that you could settle it for me. That the word Yankee itself is actually derived from the old Dutch, that this was John Kass, which literally meant John Cheese. And it was a nickname needling the Dutch as cheese eaters. And then it sort of got twisted into the vernacular of English into Yankee as opposed to Jan Kass. Is that a true story or is that mythological?
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