I met Shorto a dozen years ago in Albany, New York. We were both poking about a conference put on by the New Netherlands Society and the State Library focused on New York’s early colonial days and the enduring Dutch legacy on the American character.

I was there covering the conference for The New York Times, where I worked at the time, but Shorto was there because he felt sheepish for knowing nothing (other than something about a wooden leg) of Peter Stuyvesant, whose tombstone he passed every day in the churchyard of St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery in Manhattan’s East Village, where he played with his daughter. When Shorto, already an established writer, approached The New Yorker about a long-form article on Stuyvesant and New York’s Dutch history, the editors politely told him they’d take a “Talk of the Town” on the subject. But he sensed that the story of how Henry Hudson, Stuyvesant, and Amsterdam financiers founded the first truly diverse and capitalist North American colony deserved more than a chatty front-of-the-magazine feature.

The result was a book: The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim. The book is an impressive corrective to centuries of Anglophile histories that managed to white out the Dutch contribution to the American character. The English took over the colony of New Netherland, which encompassed much of what is now New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, in 1664. By then, New York (the city was known as New Amsterdam) had established itself as a bustling, tolerant, heterogeneous trading hub, so different from the fledgling English Puritan colonies to its north and the plantation society to its south—so much more, well, American.

In 2007, Shorto moved to Amsterdam, in part to work on his next book, Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. (Descartes, though French, spent the bulk of his adult life in the Netherlands.) The other draw was the opportunity to direct the John Adams Institute, an Amsterdam forum that hosts talks by American book authors and promotes cultural exchange between the two countries. The institute occupies the former West Indies Company headquarters, where the plans were laid for New Netherland. “A friend of mine jokes that I have crawled inside my own book,” Shorto says. Later this year, he will publish a book on the history of Amsterdam and liberalism.

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