From the Director's Desk

Dear Friends,

The summer was very busy at NNI.  Several NNI-funded Wendell Fellows and Student Scholars arrived from all over the country to conduct research in the New Netherland Research Center, the New York State Archives, and the New York State Library on a variety of intriguing topics, including the salt trade and Anglo-Dutch relations.  

We also welcomed Dr. Chelsea Teale as associate director of the New Netherland Research Center, where she will work with Dr. Charles Gehring.  Among other projects, she’s immediately made an impact with her research in the fascinating papers of A.J.F. van Laer, the archivist and translator of New Netherland documents in the first decades of the 20^th century. 

As we look to the Fall, we are eager to welcome you to Albany on October 7^th for the New Netherland Institute’s 45^th Annual Conference, Get a Sense of New Netherland: Approaching the Dutch through Sight, Sound, Taste, and Touch.  With performances, historical lectures, and a touch table, we anticipate a day of both learning and entertainment.  I also invite you to join us for the reception immediately after the conference, where we will have the opportunity to reconnect over our shared interest in New Netherland as we have done at so many conferences past.

Warmly,

Deborah Hamer. Executive Director

We invite you to register for our 45^th Annual Conference, Get a Sense of New Netherland: Approaching the Dutch through Sight, Sound, Taste, and Touch.  To be held all day Saturday, October 7th at the Huxley Theater at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York, the program explores how New Netherland’s residents experienced the world around them. 

While we know a great deal about the politics and trade of the seventeenth-century colony, we know less about the everyday lives of the people – indigenous, free, and enslaved – who lived there.  What were some of the sounds, smells, tastes, and textures of North America, and how did Europeans or Africans reproduce those of their homelands in New Netherland?

For the full program, visit https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/programs/events/.  And to register, visit https://crm.newnetherlandinstitute.org/conference/.

NNI thanks Dutch Culture USA for their generosity in supporting this program.

The American Swedish Historical Museum is hosting a November 4th conference in Philadelphia emphasizing “Contested Spaces: Colonial and Indigenous Concepts of Landscape Along the Delaware River Valley.”  The program has not yet been released, but presentations will consider the relationship between cultural groups in the region in the context of land use.  The groups include Swedes, Dutch, Lenape, British, Finns, Susquehannock, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois).

In the Nationaal Archief's latest blog - the 18th - in the series ‘400 years of Dutch-American Stories,' guest author Kees Wouters describes the enthusiastic reception of American (jazz) music and dance in the Netherlands in the 1920s, and the consternation it caused among different groups in society.

Archaeologists continue to look for the site of the short-lived fort at the Dutch colony in Zwaanandael (now Lewes, Delaware).  So far, the dig has produced inconclusive results, but NNI hopes that further exploratory work will be done.  

The New Netherland Institute has awarded three Wendell Fellowships and two Student Scholar awards this year.  Wendell fellows are Esther Baakman, Lecturer, Radboud University, Neal Dugre, Associate Professor, University of Houston-Clear Lake, and Elizabeth Hines, Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago.  For more on their projects visit here.

Student Scholars are Marian Leech, Ph.D. candidate, University of Pennsylvania and Amanda Faulkner, Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University.  For more on their topics, visit here.

New for the 2024 grant application season!  The Wendell Fellowship and the Student Scholar Award will have the same submission deadline: February 15, 2024. Nominations for the Hendricks Award and the Clague and Carol van Slyke Article Prize will continue to be due on January 15 and April 1 respectively.

Thanks to the generosity and commitment to this organization of people like you, NNI has been around since 1986. We believe you share an interest in exploring and preserving the history and legacy of the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New Netherland. Your support and encouragement will enable us to continue to reveal and publicize this often-overlooked chapter of the American story. We encourage you to keep us in mind as you consider your donations s

There are several ways to donate:

Through the NNI website or through PayPal

Write a check made out to the New Netherland Institute, and mail it to NNI at P.O. Box 2536, Empire State Plaza Station, Albany NY 12220-0536.

For information, email us at nni@newnetherlandinstitute.org or call 518-992-3274.

I thank you now for your willingness to help us fulfill our unique and important historical work.

Sincerely,

Marilyn E. Douglas, President