Latest news with #Nicolls
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
City gathers to mark 80th anniversary of VE Day
People across Hereford have been gathering to mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day. Events have taken place from St Peter's Square to the city centre to commemorate 8 May 1945, the day that marked the end of World War Two in Europe. People who lived through VE Day, including their family members, have attended events to mark the occasion and share their memories. On Thursday morning, the town crier read proclamations and a two-minute silence was held. Joyce Nicolls attended a ceremony in the city centre and said she would be remembering her mum, dad and grandparents who served in the Navy and Army. She said: "I think it's important for the youngsters to know what people went through in those years, because it wasn't bad for us growing up as we had people to teach us. "When they get to our age there will be nobody alive to tell those stories," Ms Nicolls said. Mayor Kevin Tillett said it was his duty and the duty of generations beyond him to keep wartime stories alive. "This is the last big anniversary when we'll still have people around who remember the war, who either took part in the war or lived through the war. "My father and his brothers fought in the war and my grandparents lived through the Blitz in the East End." Elise Shuker, from Hereford Cathedral School, attended the city centre event to lay a wreath in memory of those who served. "If we don't remember it, then it's going to get lost, and we need to celebrate what they did for us and the peace campaign," she said. Stephen Cole was only a baby when Europe won the war and says, despite not having any memory of celebrations at the time, he knows how important the day is. "If it wasn't for those that lost their lives, we wouldn't be here today," he said. Follow BBC Hereford & Worcester on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram. VE Day at 80: What's to come - and what you might have missed Beacons to be lit across South East for VE Day VE Day 80
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Johnstown native Shorto traces Dutch influences, New York City origins in 'Taking Manhattan' presentation
JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – Author Russell Shorto often visited St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery's cemetery when he lived in New York City's East Village neighborhood a quarter-century ago. It was home to the remains of Peter Stuyvesant, governor of New Netherland, who died in 1672. His presence got Shorto thinking about the Dutch colony's founding and the days of New Amsterdam, which eventually became New York City. 'I tend to be drawn to origins,' said Shorto, a Johnstown native and current Cumberland, Maryland resident, during a presentation at Heritage Johnstown's Heritage Discovery Center Wednesday. From that beginning, the subjects of Dutch history and culture have frequently appeared in Shorto's work throughout the years. His most recent book, 'Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America,' was released earlier this year. His other writings on the Dutch include 'Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City' and 'The Island at the Center of the World,' a predecessor to 'Taking Manhattan.' His latest book tells the story of when in 1664, Richard Nicolls, a military officer, was sent by the king of England to gain control of the colony. Both sides pointed cannons at each other, ready to fight. But a compromise that Shorto described as 'a bill of rights' was reached instead between Nicolls and Stuyvesant. 'The Dutch had argued for these terms that they would keep their homes, they would keep their families, their businesses, their trade networks all over the world,' Shorto, a knight of the Netherlands' Order of Orange- Nassau, said. 'The only thing that would change is the city would become English and Nicholls would become its governor.' And that was how New Amsterdam became New York City. The agreement preserved the tolerant and multicultural society established by the Dutch, along with its economic base, all of which Shorto said was the 'secret sauce' that Nicolls wanted. 'Those two things – a mixed society and this capitalistic economic support – are kind of the recipe for New York, and not just for New York, but for America, because ,eventually New York would become powerful enough that it would influence America,' Shorto said. That created two distinct English centers in the colonies – New York City and the more theocratic, puritanical society in New England. 'These two ideologies in a way, if you think about it, are competing with each other throughout all of American history, even to where we are today,' Shorto said. 'I think frankly – this is just my editorializing – I think the country needs both, but it needs to figure out how they can work together. 'When the country has functioned at its best has been times when they can figure out ways for those two to compromise, the way Stuyvesant and Nicholls did in creating something.' The presentation was the latest event in which Shorto has collaborated with Heritage Johnstown. 'Certainly, he's been a great friend to our organization over the years,' said Shelley Johansson, Heritage Johnstown's director of marketing and communications. 'To have an author of his caliber from Johnstown and he writes books that have to do with history, of course it's a natural we would want to present him with his newest book any time the opportunity presents itself.'
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
America's fatal division is nothing new: It was baked in from the beginning
For much of our history Americans have been enchanted by a fable of their own invention: that we are one people, that 'America' means more or less the same thing to us all. If it has done nothing else, the political turmoil of the past decade has revealed the hollowness of that notion. In fact, polarization is fused into the very foundation of the American project. In the late summer of 1664, an English military officer named Richard Nicolls led a flotilla of four warships across the Atlantic with the intention of transforming the nascent American colonies. After a long and bloody civil war that had pitted the religious militants known as the Puritans against the Stuart monarchy, the royals were once again in power in England, and Charles II and his brother James, the Duke of York, were eager to begin building an empire. Nicolls, their dutiful operative, had two missions. The first was to wrest Manhattan Island from the control of the Dutch, whose colony of New Netherland had existed for 40 years. Nicolls was armed and ready for battle — the two nations were bitter rivals. Surprisingly, however, he engaged Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch leader, in negotiation. They discovered they had much in common. The royalist faction in England were essentially moderates, who believed in religious liberty, wanted global trade and founded the Royal Society to advance science. The Dutch were all about those same things. Rather than fight, Nicolls and Stuyvesant effected a merger. Under their agreement, the city of New Amsterdam would keep its mixed population and the Dutch features of capitalism and relative tolerance, but the settlement and its inhabitants would transfer to English rule. Nicolls proudly wrote James that he had renamed the city with one of his titles: 'I gave to this place, the name of N. Yorke.' Then Nicolls turned to his other mission. Decades earlier, the Puritans had planted colonies in New England, with Boston as their base. Nicolls and his emissaries were to bring the Puritans there to heel, to compel them to put aside recent differences and respect the king and his government. But the Puritans had established a powerful theocratic rule, crushing political opposition and religious diversity with violence. They considered the Stuarts and their followers to be godless and corrupt, while they saw themselves as the chosen people. Nicolls got nowhere with them. Few Americans have heard of Richard Nicolls, but today we are living with the fallout from his two missions. New York and New England went on to become competing centers of power and ideology: one pluralistic and globally-minded; the other moralistic, monocultural and, well, puritanical. The geography shifted over the centuries, but these ideologies each grew along with the nation. Indeed, you can read American history — from the Civil War to Reconstruction to the civil rights movement to the age of Trump — as a long, Manichaean struggle between two opposing belief systems. The creation of the American republic was a valiant attempt at uniting the two sides, but the founders themselves were well aware of the gulf, and of how differently each saw the new nation. The philosophical descendants of the Puritans believed the call to freedom that was embedded in the founding was meant for white Christians. As it evolved in the 19th century, this ideology held that the country was a promised land, the 'city upon a hill' that Puritan leader John Winthrop of Massachusetts spoke of. This America had a theological destiny – a manifest destiny, as it was termed in the 19th century by a pro-expansion, pro-slavery champion – 'to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.' The rival ideology, meanwhile, viewed the cry for freedom in the Declaration of Independence as only a first step. Over time, its adherents pushed for the abolition of slavery, for women's suffrage, for civil rights for all, for same-sex marriage. As the left has ventured into new territory — trans rights, Black Lives Matter, land acknowledgments — the right has shifted in the other direction, embracing racist and 'tradwife' tropes that no politician would have dreamed of employing a decade ago. Then, finally, a dam burst and, in the eyes of millions of latter-day Puritans, one man stepped forward who was brave enough to speak the truth. Republicans were the first to realize the hollowness of the myth of one America, and to act. Wokeness woke them, led them to see the other side as beyond their moral boundaries. Some on the right were goaded by media outlets that used wild exaggerations and downright lies to portray people on the left as cartoon effigies of evil secular impulses, but setting aside the lies and distortions, a great many people felt a genuine abhorrence for pluralistic, secular society and a government that based policy on cold scientific studies and New Agey concepts of radical equality rather than on biblical or other traditional on the left are shocked by the willingness of Republicans to follow President Trump into anti-constitutional territory, but for the Puritans' descendants the system of government that was forged in the 18th century was only ever a vehicle to get to the promised land. America as a joint project was useful while the myth held. Today's Puritans have shown in innumerable ways that they have seen through the myth and have moved on: from refusing to consider Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominees to rejecting the results of the 2020 election to redefining the Jan. 6 insurrection as an act of patriotism to Vice President JD Vance's recent reprise of Trump's 'enemy within' trope to the moves the Trump administration is now taking toward autocracy. Democrats still haven't fully awakened from the dream of America as a joint project – think of Joe Biden's quaint-sounding use of the phrase 'my Republican friends' – though they are now tossing and turning in their sleep. What you might call an inherited trauma has defined us from the start. Unless Republicans have a radical change of heart and find that they would rather work alongside their ideological adversaries for the good of both than follow their president into a strange future of chaos and despotism, the non-Puritans among us need to accept that an accidental experiment, which began nearly four centuries ago with Richard Nicolls' twin missions and which was rooted in the European struggle between faith and reason, is at an end. Like an otherwise sturdy building with a flawed foundation, the myth of one country held for a good long time then collapsed in a rush. We don't know what the new structure will look like yet or who will build it, but one side already has its blueprints and has started hammering.
Telegraph
15-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The unlikely tale of how New Amsterdam became New York
In 1664, New Amsterdam, Russell Shorto writes in Taking Manhattan, was 'a young city perched on the edge of a wilderness.' The Dutch, under Peter Stuyvesant, had created a flourishing, unusually 'tolerant' outpost on the tip of modern-day Manhattan, home to diverse nationalities and faiths. Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the English began to look to their territories in America which had been left untended like 'weeds'. And there were those who began to turn a covetous eye to the increasingly prosperous colony of New Netherland. A mission emerged to 'solve the puzzle of North America'. Richard Nicolls, a childhood companion of Charles II and his brother James, was sent to lead it. He was tasked with two aims: to rein in the wayward Puritans who were disavowing the monarchy in the English colony of Massachusetts, and to take over the Dutch island of Manhattan. Since communication across the Atlantic was unreliable and slow, how this would be accomplished was left to Nicolls's own 'skill and dexterity'. Taking Manhattan builds on Shorto's 2004 book, The Island at the Centre of the World, which told the story of how the Dutch colony was founded. Shorto continues that story here, centring on the bloodless handover of Manhattan to the English and on Nicolls, a 'highly influential' figure whose legacy has been 'seriously neglected'. Handled differently, the colony might have been taken by force, and the Dutch influence – the trade networks and skilled population: what Shorto rather cheesily calls the island's 'secret sauce' – could have been lost. Instead, Nicolls sought out local leaders like the governor of Connecticut, to better understand the people involved and how to exert pressure through bargaining. Together with Stuyvesant, Nicolls drew up an agreement which, as Shorto explains it, reads more like a business transaction than a treaty. For Shorto, this forgotten moment in American history is important for the light it sheds on two guiding questions: why 'New York mesmerise[s] people from all over the world' and what this special quality tells us about American identity. 'Consider,' Shorto writes, that '40 per cent of Americans alive today are Americans because New York Harbour beckoned their ancestors.' Unpicking the story of the city's origin might reveal the identities and ideas fomented there: through the course of this book, Shorto wonders about American freedom, the benefits of immigration to the young city, the tolerance of difference this required its people's essential spirit of enterprise. One of the most captivating aspects of Taking Manhattan is how it reflects the city's diverse population by telling stories of many different lives: freed slaves; farmers; traders; politicians; soldiers; men and women; English, Dutch and Native Americans. These stories sit side by side and are often told in a dramatic present tense. But there are problems here, too. Shorto writes that we shouldn't judge the past by our own standards: for example, the 'toleration' and 'freedom' apparently inherited from the Dutch are challenging to understand alongside their colonial land grabbing and slave trading. But making historical figures into characters asks us to imagine their emotions, and it's hard not to fill these gaps with our own modern judgments and understandings. Shorto's own biases are not difficult to detect. He relishes the romance of the Royalist cause going back to the English Civil War – the subject of a lengthy and not always abundantly relevant digression – and sees the Puritan population in America and in England as tyrannical hypocrites. The considerable moral failings of fledgling capitalism are explored but handled with more circumspection: as New Amsterdam became New York, a ship arrived with hundreds of slaves aboard – the first of its kind – and began a thriving trade through the city. This enterprise was initiated by the Dutch but completed by the English. In today's America, Shorto sees a 'religious tribalism' that has overemphasised the nation's Christian origins; Taking Manhattan seeks to counter that narrative, with the Dutch's 'secular pluralism' enthusiastically lauded. While this is an informative and thought-provoking history, in places it shades towards romance and vilification. It sets out to trace the origins of New York's 'mesmerising' virtues and finds them in the pragmatism of the Dutch.
The Guardian
15-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘New York plows ahead': how the English invaded and changed a city
In lower Manhattan, at Pearl Street and Coenties Alley in the oldest part of New York City, walls and a cistern are visible under the sidewalk, through pains of clouded glass. Next to them, the outline of a 17th-century building is marked in colored brick. 'That is the footprint of the original Stadt Huys, which was first the city tavern and then became' the city hall of New Amsterdam, the author and historian Russell Shorto said. 'When they were excavating to put in that skyscraper [85 Broad Street, built for Goldman Sachs in the 1980s], the archeologists identified and marked out those little bits. 'New York plows ahead. But there are those tantalizing remnants. And really, the street pattern of the financial district is the street pattern of New Amsterdam. I've given many tours there and what I tell people is: 'Just don't look up at the skyscrapers, or it ruins the effect. If you have the Castello Plan, the map of New Amsterdam from 1660, you can make this left and that right and make your way around.'' One alternative to packing an ancient map and walking is to read Shorto's histories. In 2004, he had a hit with The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. Now, two decades later, he has published Taking Manhattan, about how, in 1664, New Amsterdam became New York. 'It was not always the plan to follow it,' Shorto said of his earlier book. But both books grew from a 'translation project that's been going on in Albany [the New York state capital, up the Hudson River] since the 1970s, translating 12,000 pages of the official corpus of the Dutch colony. Over the past five, six or seven years, they have moved to … the last few years [of New Amsterdam]. And that gives a picture of the colony at its height, just before the English took over. And that made me think: 'Well, I'm now getting a sense of the place the way Richard Nicolls would have seen it, as this fruit that had ripened.' Nicolls was New York's first English governor. To Shorto, he presents 'that alluring combination of a highly influential yet seriously neglected figure'. He was a soldier, a civil war veteran from Ampthill in Bedfordshire with close ties to the Duke of York, the future King James II. Sent to take New Amsterdam from the Dutch, he did so by negotiation rather than force, then renamed the place for his boss. 'Like everyone else, I had kind of jumped over that moment,' Shorto said. 'It's seen as if it's inevitable but as with any historical period, if you zoom in and focus and look at it from the perspective of the people on the ground, then of course you don't see it as inevitable. You see the future as uncertain.' Nicolls faced great uncertainty from the moment his ship reached the great harbor of New Amsterdam, then paused to await the rest of his squadron. Shorto captures the moment in typically evocative prose, Nicolls and his men, nerves on edge, aboard a ship riding 'an immensity of blue-brown tidal chop'. Miles away, on the low southern tip of Manhattan, Peter Stuyvesant faced uncertainty too. He was the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, a wooden-legged hard case who faced ruin but eventually, with his townspeople and Nicolls, achieved a strange sort of coup, averting death and destruction to birth a true world city. It was built on the backs of others. Native peoples – the Lenape, the Esopus, more – ceded land to the Europeans and died from disease that came with the ships. Africans arrived in those ships, in increasing numbers, most to live a miserable life, enslaved. Echoing a device used for Revolution Song, his book about how America won independence, Shorto threads the stories of ordinary people in New Amsterdam with those of the leaders tangling above them. One is Dorothea Angola, who 'as her name suggests … had been born in Africa but had lived most of her life in New Amsterdam. And while she was African, she was enslaved to no one but was, in fact, a property owner, a woman who commanded respect.' Her presence is one indication that since Shorto wrote The Island at the Center of the World, much about history and its uses has changed. Everything is contested. Reckonings with dark legacies, of colonialism and slavery, are increasingly common. Shorto said he had 'changed, along with society. I'm much more aware than I was then. So that becomes part of this story.' But he also warns of the dangers of presentism, the projection of modern attitudes on to events centuries past. 'Europeans were not smarter than Native Americans,' he writes, 'nor were Native Americans morally superior to Europeans.' He said: 'There is that tendency to say, 'OK, now we're going to focus on the Native American side of the story, and they are necessarily in a morally higher position.' I think you could pull back and forth. You could look at it from our perspective and say: 'Yes, they were swindled.' But if you spend most of your time on the ground with the characters, then when I'm with this person, I'm trying to do it from their perspective, and then if I'm switching to someone who's on the other side, I'm doing it from their perspective then.' Shorto does not shrink from the cruelties of colonialism and slavery, the hypocrisies of religion that supported such schemes. But as he thinks of himself 'more as a storyteller than a historian', so he feels more freedom than most academics. 'Over thousands of years, I don't think humans have gotten more intelligent, or wiser. For the Native people, granted, Europeans came and pushed things, but indications are that Native people valued certain things in the relationship as well. So then you have this very human thing, that kind of back and forth. You have an obligation to look at: 'What were they getting out of it, and how did they negotiate these deals, and how did the other side respond?'' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Shorto considers another bit of received historical wisdom: that the Dutch Republic of the 1600s was a shining beacon of religious tolerance. 'You know, the Dutch have been asking themselves questions for 20 years now. I know Dutch people who basically say: 'There never was Dutch tolerance.' I don't think that's true. You have to look at what it was and was not. It basically applied to other white European Christians. But nevertheless, it was something, at a time when in France and in Spain, intolerance was official policy. So that made the Dutch Republic a different kind of place, and it made this colony different as well.' New Amsterdam was very different to Boston, the English settlement to the north, which Richard Nicolls's royal master ordered him to bring to heel, a task every bit as challenging as dealing with the Dutch on Manhattan. At the end of his book, Shorto peers into a divide that echoes down to this day. 'We might think of American politics as having two wings. One is defiantly moralistic, harps incessantly on the country's Christian origins, and insists that these should be the guiding principles in settling issues of the day. We can look to the Puritan settlement of New England as the source of this strain in American politics. 'When the Puritans arrived, they saw America as the promised land and believed they had God's blessing … to establish on the American continent a base of righteousness. This strain of thought runs through all the great political issues the country has grappled with. It has been used to justify slavery, to combat women's suffrage and the civil rights movement, to oppose abortion, to champion Donald Trump.' On the other hand, 'while volumes of scholarship have been devoted to the Puritan element in American politics, the source of the other wing of political thought has been harder to pinpoint, partly because it is so diverse. It sees itself as secular, reason-based, rooted in the Enlightenment. It is a messier tradition. I think there's good reason to look to New York as its source.' Shorto said he was offering 'a suggestion more than a thesis … I just wanted to plant the idea that Richard Nicolls took the colony from the Dutch in this very creative way, and that set up this place that was relatively tolerant, outward looking, globally minded and pragmatic. But he failed in his second mission' to bring the Puritans under control. 'Did he set up this kind of Manichaean struggle between these two ideologies, who have been at war with each other ever since? I think it's an interesting template for looking at all of American history – right to this very moment.' Taking Manhattan is out now in the US and on 27 March in the UK
