11-05-2021, 04:01 AM
(10-19-2018, 06:38 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Good summary, pbrower, and that's such a great map. It is from a genetics research company ad, isn't it? I remember seeing it on my feeds and thinking of how it confirms David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, as well as Kevin Phillips' The Cousins' Wars.
That is the idea. I was amazed that the map so well fit. I would expect the roles of the "Finnish" and "Portuguese" to have been smaller.
But the Dutch settled New Amsterdam, northeastern New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley? Sort of. Most of the settlers of the Dutch colony of New Netherland were not Dutch. They included French-speaking French and Walloon Huguenots who were identical in religion if not language to Dutch Calvinists. Dutch assimilation of them was going on, as one can tell from some translated surnames (such as "de la Rue" becoming "Vanderstratten"). The distinction between Dutch and German nationality was comparatively new, as the Dutch language is basically a Low German dialect that many people in northern Germany were still speaking. Many of these became the soldiers. There were Norwegian and Danish sailors who settled once their terms as sailors were up. There were people from the English colonies who fled religious persecution in New England. Those encompass some of my known ancestors who lived in the Dutch colony of New Netherland that I know of. If one were not a Catholic one was extremely welcome in New Amsterdam.
Others? There were some Italians and Greeks (the latter sailors? Greece has a long heritage of sailing, and the only reason for the Greeks to have not had large colonies in the New World was that there was no Greek state at the time of the early European settlement of the Americas). There were some Poles who lived in a country that got religious tolerance right. There were people with Spanish and Portuguese surnames... but most of those were Jews who had chosen to get as far from the Inquisition as possible. And, yes, the Dutch had slaves, Africans transported to do the dirty work. I know of no ancestry from any of those population. But I expose much about myself that isn't significant. I'm about half German and Swiss from people not involved with New Netherland, and I recognize more in common in culture and morals to Jews than to the vilest filth that ever took human form.
The Dutch colony in New Amsterdam shaped patterns for greater New York City that remain true to this day, most notably its cosmopolitan character. New York City was a cosmopolitan, polyglot community when the Dutch owned it. Trade and commerce remain extremely important there, but that more reflects geography that has never changed.
Oh, by the way -- Donald Trump doesn't really fit in New York City. :
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The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.