This is a departure from natural history, but I want to highly recommend a just published book: Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America by Russell Shorto (W. W. Norton & Co.). It is a sequel to the same author’s classic book The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (2004, Doubleday). Shorto’s earlier book recounted the history of New Amsterdam and how many of the American ideals of religious freedom and pluralism that are often attributed to the English colonies were actually passed on to the American colonies from the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. In his new book, Shorto recounts the events of the late summer of 1664 when England sent a flotilla under command of Richard Nicolls to take control of New Amsterdam away from the Netherlands and add it to the growing British Empire. Instead of the military confrontation that both sides expected Nicolls and the Dutch leader of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, negotiated a peaceful transfer of power from the Dutch to the English. Nicolls renamed the town at the southern tip of Manhattan New York and became the colonies first English governor. Shorto describes the peaceful transition as a merger rather than a military takeover. He guaranteed the population the rights and freedoms they had been used to under the Dutch and gave rise to modern New York city and many of the freedoms of the future United States.
