Plan Versus Execution: The “Ideal City” of New Amsterdam. Seventeenth-Century Netherlandic Town Planning in North America

2016 ◽  
Vol 96 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 265-283
Author(s):  
Jeroen van den Hurk
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Town Planning ◽  
New Amsterdam ◽  
The Ideal

"Prodigious Poop": Comic Context and Psychological Subtext in Irving's Knickerbocker History

1995 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-512
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Cook
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Psychological Development ◽  
Human Reproduction ◽  
New Amsterdam ◽  
History Of

This essay attempts to elucidate the structual principles of Irving's "low" humor in the Knickerbocker History of New York by showing that the History is predicated on a schema of human development. In this comprehensive comic allegory the "peopling" of North America suggests the process of human reproduction while the "infant history" of seventeenth-century New York parallels the process of childhood psychological development according to a Freudian psychoanalytic model. As clusters of comic imagery and episode reveal, the reigns of Irving's three Dutch governors-Walter the Doubter, William the Testy, and Peter the Headstrong-embody the oral, anal, and genital (phallic) stages of child development. Similarly, the instinctual orientation of the gubernatorial body is mirrored in the body politic. The reign of Peter Stuyvesant, which occupies the most space in the History, is also notable for a pair of allegorical doublets, Jacobus Von Poffenburgh and Antony Van Corlear, who represent Peter's false and true phallic heroes, respectively. During Peter's reign, an implied contest between these two phallic personages transpires, ending with the English takeover of New Amsterdam.

The Ideal Hero: A Seventeenth-Century Choice

1965 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
F. K. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Ideal

Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate in the Dutch Republic in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Conflicting Interests ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Held Back

Spinoza’s time was rife with conflicts. Historians tend to structure these by grouping two opposing forces: progressive Cartesio-Cocceian-liberals versus conservative Aristotelian-Voetian-Orangists. Moderately enlightened progressives, so the story goes, endorsed notions such as human dignity, toleration, freedom of opinion, but shied away from radicalism, held back by the conservative counterforce. Yet the drift was supposed to be inevitably towards the Enlightenment. This chapter tries to capture theological conflicts in the Dutch Republic of the Early Enlightenment in a triangular scheme, that covers a wider range of conflicting interests. Its corners are constituted by ‘dogmatism’ (Dordrecht orthodoxy), ‘scripturalism’ (Cocceianism), and ‘rationalism’ (theology inspired by Cartesianism, Spinozism, or any other brand of new philosophy). Dogmatics and rationalists battled in terms of philosophy, whereas the scripturalists and their respective opponents fought each other rather in the field of biblical scholarship. This multilateral conflict within Dutch Calvinism made the ideal of a unified church untenable.

To “experiment with a parcel of negros”

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-69
Author(s):  
Dennis J. Maika
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Collaborative Model ◽  
New Amsterdam ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
Private Investors

Abstract In late 1659, the Dutch West India Company’s Amsterdam Chamber began an “experiment” intended to bring a regularized slave trade to New Amsterdam. With Curaçao as a reliable source of enslaved Africans, the Amsterdam Chamber opened the slave trade to independent investors and merchants, following a collaborative model between a state-sponsored corporation and private investors used elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch Atlantic world. A variety of commercial actors responded to the experiment, devising speculative strategies to incorporate enslaved people into their commercial portfolios. This essay tracks the strategies conceived by New Amsterdam merchants, local wic representatives, and some independent Amsterdam investors, and reveals the experiment’s uneven progression, modulated by changing regional conditions and regular adjustments and reversals by the Amsterdam Chamber. This article adds a new dimension to studies of the early North American regional slave trade, typically seen from an English perspective, by appreciating Dutch New Amsterdam’s legacy.

scholarly journals The Timeless African and the Versatile Indian in Seventeenth-Century Travelogues

2005 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Michel Duquet
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
American Indian ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Tropical Environment ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Native Populations ◽  
French And English ◽  
North American Indian

Abstract The seventeenth century saw the early stages of significant trading on the west coast of Africa as well as the establishment of permanent settlements in North America by Dutch, French and English explorers, merchants, colonists and missionaries in a period marked by the imperial contest that had been set in motion on the heels of the discovery of America in 1492. The travelers who wrote about their voyages overseas described at length the natives they encountered on the two continents. The images of the North American Indian and of the African that emerged from these travel accounts were essentially the same whether they be of Dutch, French or English origin. The main characteristic in the descriptions of African native populations was its permanent condemnation while representations of the Indian were imbued with sentiments ranging from compassion, censure and admiration. The root causes for this dichotomy were the inhospitable and deadly (to Europeans) tropical environment of Africa’s West Coast and the growing knowledge of local societies that Europeans acquired in North America. The analysis of the contrasting images of natives on both sides of the Atlantic and the context within which they were produced are the focus of the paper.

The Nature of the South

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lyman Bushman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Temperature Gradient ◽  
Growing Season ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Plantation Agriculture ◽  
Southern Colonies

Plantation agriculture in the western hemisphere extended from Brazil northward through the Caribbean to the northern boundary of Maryland. This geography created a line in North America noted by seventeenth-century imperial economists. The southern colonies produced crops needed in the home land making the South far more valuable to the empire than the North. Plantation agriculture stopped at the Maryland-Pennsylvania border because the climate made slavery impractical north of that line. Only farmers who produced valuable exports could afford the price of slaves. Tobacco, though it could be grown in the North, was not commercially feasible there. The growing season had to be long enough to get a crop in the ground while also planting corn for subsistence, allow the tobacco to mature, and harvest it before the first frost. Tobacco was practical within the zone of the 180-day growing season whose isotherm outlines the areas where slavery flourished. Within this zone, the ground could be worked all but a month or two in winter, giving slaves plenty to do. Cattle could also forage for themselves, reducing the need for hay. Southern farmers could devote themselves to provisions and market crops, increasing their wealth substantially compared to the North where haying occupied much of the summer. Differing agro-systems developed along a temperature gradient running from North to South with contrasting crops and labor systems attached to each.

scholarly journals Discipline and Divinity: Colonial Quakerism, Christianity, and “Heathenism” in the Seventeenth Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Plank
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Core Beliefs ◽  
Society Of Friends ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Christian Teaching ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Message

Quakers began arriving in the Caribbean and North America when their religious society was still new and struggling to define its core beliefs and institutional structure. There were tensions within the Society of Friends stemming from the Quakers’ validation of individual inspiration and their communal commitment to the Christian message as contained in the Bible. A bitter debate over scriptural authority wracked Quaker meetings for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and the controversy included arguments over the Quakers’ relations with Native Americans, Africans, and others outside of Europe beyond the reach of formal Christian teaching. On both sides of the Atlantic opponents of Quaker discipline challenged long-standing assumptions about the source and content of the Christian message and the social hierarchies that resulted when some groups claimed privileged access to truth. The ensuing argument influenced the Quakers’ plans for their colonies in North America, and their debate over slavery.

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