New Netherland Project

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The New Netherland Project was created to translate and publish 17th century Dutch documents from the period of the Dutch colonization of New Netherland. The Project was established in 1974 by the New York State Library and the Holland Society of New York; it has so far published over sixteen volumes of translated documents.

One of the primary goals of the Project is make documentary evidence from the Dutch colony available to American scholars who are unable to read seventeenth-century Dutch, and the documents translated so far have already been used by researchers in a wide variety of disciplines. Among the better-known examples is Russell Shorto's book The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America (2004).

However, the Project is also committed to making their material accessible to the general public in order to tell the story of the impact of the Dutch in American colonial history. The Project does this through:

a newsletter, De Nieu Nederlanse Marcurius;
an annual conference (open to the general public) called the Rensselaerswijck Seminar, which invites five speakers to Albany, NY to present their latest research on a specific aspect of the Dutch experience in North America; and
the development and distribution of curricula concerning New Netherland for use in secondary schools (4th and 7th grades).