1st Edition
A Firm Peace and Sincere Friendship? Four Centuries Dutch-American Stories
By Jaap Jacobs
Copyright 2025
300 Pages
by
Amsterdam University Press
For four centuries, people from the Netherlands have gone to America by boat or plane, to explore the country, to trade, to colonise, to settle, to do business, to find a new future or simply to visit the country as a tourist. And for four centuries, Americans, of diverse backgrounds, of native, African or European descent, have come to the Netherlands. These are their stories. This book begins... Read more
Prefaces, Foreword A Question Mark? 1 A Dutch-American Perspective 2 ‘Even old New York was once New Amsterdam’ 3 Mayken’s World 4 Mass Murder on Manhattan 5 Edward Winslow Anglo-Dutch-American Pilgrim 6 The Tale of the White Horse The First Slave Trading Voyage to New Netherland 7 Sight, Sound, Touch, and Taste Sensing the Dutch in New Netherland 8 The Dutch Republic through Bostonian Eyes The Travel Journals of Jonathan Belcher and Jacob Wendell, 1704–1716 9 Johnny Goes Dutch 10 Fellow Founding Fathers Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp and Thomas Jefferson 11 On the First Dutch Translation of the U.S. Constitution 12 Sweet Prospects and a Bitter Experience The Adventures of Gerrit Boon and Jan Lincklaen 13 Sojourner Truth How the Enslaved Woman of a Dutch-New York Family Became an Icon of America’s Black Liberation Movement 14 John Romeyn Brodhead’s Hunt for History 15 Rising from the Ashes The Afterlife of a Phoenix 16 “For Two Years, or Perhaps Forever” Wilhelmina Douglas Hawley and the Artists’ Colony in Rijsoord 17 Jane Addams and Aletta Jacobs at the Women’s Congress in The Hague 18 Breaking Free from a Girls’ Boarding School? American Mass Culture and the Roaring Twenties in the Netherlands 19 The ‘Patron Saint’ of New York? 20 A Dutch Prince, His American Jeep, and Two Female Passengers, 21 A Saber for Eisenhower, Forging Transatlantic Bonds for the Twentieth Century 22 Growing Up Dutch in Iowa 23 Recollections and Reconnections, War History as Family History 24 Lady Liberty as Muse, An Inspired Dutch Writer’s Love for the United States of America 25 Hurley and its History, Historical Views Changing over Time 26 When Did It All Begin? Acknowledgments, Contributors, Further Reading & Sources, Illustration Credits, Index
Biography
Dr. Jaap Jacobs is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews. He specializes in early American history and early modern Dutch expansion, particularly in North America. He previously published The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America.
