Taking Manhattan
The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America
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4.0 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Best Book of 2025
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
The author of The Island at the Center of the World offers up a thrilling narrative of how New York—that brash, bold, archetypal city—came to be.
In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general.
Bristling with vibrant characters, Taking Manhattan reveals the founding of New York to be an invention, the result of creative negotiations that would blend the multiethnic, capitalistic society of New Amsterdam with the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery. The book draws from newly translated materials and illuminates neglected histories—of religious refugees, Indigenous tribes, and free and enslaved Africans.
Taking Manhattan tells the riveting story of the birth of New York City as a center of capitalism and pluralism, a foundation from which America would rise. It also shows how the paradox of New York’s origins—boundless opportunity coupled with subjugation and displacement—reflects America’s promise and failure to this day. Russell Shorto, whose work has been described as “astonishing” (New York Times) and “literary alchemy” (Chicago Tribune), has once again mined archival sources to offer a vibrant tale and a fresh and trenchant argument about American beginnings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 1664 deal that transferred power from the Dutch to the English in what is now New York City was an inventive act that would be foundational to the metropolis to come, according to historian Shorto's revelatory sequel to The Island at the Center of the World. When Richard Nicolls, the Englishman tasked with capturing New Amsterdam, came up against Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of the Dutch enclave, the two men astonishingly disobeyed orders from their respective empires to fight and instead negotiated peacefully. Long considered merely a sign of Dutch decline, Shorto sees more to the story of the handover: the contrarian Nicolls and the abrasive Stuyvesant were not only the right men at the right time—both constitutionally suited to ignore authority—but also a kind of new man brought into being by the very empires that had molded them. Agents of imperial capitalism, they were more interested in business than war: the deal preserved and expanded the unique system of free enterprise that had been brewing on the tiny island, with unprecedented freedom of religion and property guaranteed by Nicolls for residents of the already famously business-friendly and pluralistic city. (The earlier Dutch theft of Manhattan from the Wampanoag, Shorto suggests, also presaged another uniquely American form of dealmaking—the scam.) Shorto's storytelling is wry and accomplished, transforming a campaign of letter-writing and procedural legerdemain into a brisk and amusing saga. Readers will be wowed.
