The New Netherland Institute's 2026 Annual Conference, New Netherland and the World, will be held in Albany at the New York State Museum on November 7-8, 2026.  We will announce the full program and provide the registration link in June.

Image: Jan Albertsz. Rotius, Still Life, ca. 1650. From the Collection of the Rijksmuseum.

On Sunday, April 12, Deborah Hamer and Genevieve Wheeler Brown had a great discussion about Wheeler Brown's new book, Beyond Blue and White. If you missed the event, check out this interview with Wheeler Brown on WAMC Northeast Public Radio.

The New York State Library has digitized the Van Rensselaer Manor Land Surveys (1785-1840) and Maps. To learn more about the collection, visit the collection description here. 

See transcriptions of the records of the Albany Indian Commissioners from 1677 to 1755 as well as summaries of these records which cover the 1723-1729 period.  You can also find links to the original documents which are housed in Library and Archives Canada.  This is a great resource for anyone interested in Dutch-Indigenous relations in the 18th century.

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California has created the digital exhibition Representing Women: Gender and Portraiture in 17th-Century Europe.  Curated by Maggie Bell, this free resource explores ten Dutch and Flemish paintings of women from the 17th century in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum and shows some of the variety of women that were portrayed in the period.

Image: Johannes Corneliszoon Verspronk, Portrait of a Lady, 1641. From the Collection of the Norton Simon Museum.

Jeroen Dewulf (University of California, Berkeley) has a new article out in the Colonial Latin American Review about the origins of the first group of Enslaved Africans to arrive in New Netherland in 1627. 

The latest issue of the Holland Society's journal De Halve Maen is out now.  Volume 98, No. 1 has articles by Jonas Danen on gardens in New Netherland and Kenneth Shefsiek on Peter Stuyvesant's financing of the church in New Netherland.

Sandra Freels' new novel, Anneke Jans in the New World, is out now.  Based on events recorded in New Netherland documents, Freels tells the story of Anneke Jans, who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1630 and found herself thrust into the violent conflict between her husband, the minister Everardus Bogardus, and the colony's director, Willem Kieft. 

Now out in paperback, Stephen Staggs' book Calvinists and Indians in the Northeastern Woodlands explores how the Dutch Republic's Calvinism influenced the ways in which Dutch ministers and colonists in New Netherland understood and interacted with their Indigenous neighbors.  

The Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati, Ohio has Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White on view until May 17, 2026.  Explore nearly fifty Rembrandt etchings on a variety of subjects, including self-portraits, scenes from daily life, landscapes, and still lifes, from the Collection of the Rembrandt House Museum in the Netherlands.

Image: Rembrandt, Self-Portrait, ca. 1642. Collection of the Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam.

The New York State History Conference will take place on June 11-12, 2026 at Marist University.  The conference includes a number of panels about the American Revolution, including the keynote panel, which will feature contributors from the new volume, Fire and Freedom: The American Revolution in New York, edited by Thomas S. Wermuth, Devin Lander, Jennifer Lemak, and Robert Chiles with a foreword by Russell Shorto (Cornell University Press, 2026).