Russell Shorto became the director of the John Adams Institute ,in Amstersam in January 2008.
He is the author of The Island at the Center of the World, an internationally acclaimed bestseller about the Dutch founding of Mathattan, which won the New York City Book Award, the Washington Irving Prize, and many other awards. He is also a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and father of Anna and Eva. His next book, Descartes' Bones, is due out in October 2008.
About New-York foundation in the Guardian
New Amsterdam was an anarchic, rumbustious place, where Griet Reyniers, queen of tarts, with her half-black husband Antony van Salee at her side, would measure her customers' penises on her broomstick. Some people found this chaos intolerable, and the grandee Van Rensselaer, for example, unilaterally created a colony within a colony, in which he had more or less feudal powers. New Amsterdam was that curious phenomenon, repeated in the British empire, of a commercial company controlling a country: an activity for which it was unequipped, especially at long distance. The colony grew under its own steam, going its own way, by 1638 having become a "sprawling, brawling lawless mess on the brink of extinction".
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