1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910788305403321

Autore

Dening Donna Merwick <1932->

Titolo

Stuyvesant bound [[electronic resource] ] : an essay on loss across time / / Donna Merwick

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2013

ISBN

0-8122-0802-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (244 p.)

Collana

Early American Studies

Disciplina

974.7/02092

Soggetti

Dutch - New York (State) - History - 17th century

New Netherland Historiography

New Netherland History

New York (State) History Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [201]-212) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface. The Outcast -- I. Duty -- Chapter 1. Magistracy and Confessional Politics -- Chapter 2. Conflicts and Reputation -- Chapter 3. Protecting by Deterrence -- Chapter 4. "The General" -- Part II. Belief -- Chapter 5. The Struggle to Believe -- Chapter 6. Managing Conventicles -- Chapter 7. Ordinances: The Needle of Sin -- Part III. Loss -- Chapter 8. To Suffer Loss, 1664-1667 -- Chapter 9. Dismissal and Return -- Chapter 10. Stuyvesant Tattooed -- Chapter 11. A Place in Early America -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Sommario/riassunto

Stuyvesant Bound is an innovative and compelling evaluation of the last director general of New Netherland. Donna Merwick examines the layers of culture in which Peter Stuyvesant forged his career and performed his responsibilities, ultimately reappraising the view of Stuyvesant long held by the majority of U.S. historians and commentators. Borrowing its form from the genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-​century learned essays, Stuyvesant Bound invites the reader to step into a premodern worldview as Merwick considers Stuyvesant's role in history from the perspectives of duty, belief, and loss. Stuyvesant is presented as a mid-seventeenth-century magistrate obliged by his official oath to manage New Netherland, including



installing Calvinist politics and belief practices under the fragile conditions of early modern spirituality after the Protestant Reformation. Merwick meticulously reconstructs the process by which Stuyvesant became his own archivist and historian when, recalled to The Hague to answer for his surrender of New Netherland in 1664, he gathered together papers amounting to almost 50,000 words and offered them to the States General. Though Merwick weaves the theme of loss throughout this meditation on Stuyvesant's career, the association culminates in New Netherland's fall to the English in 1664 and Stuyvesant's immediate recall to Holland to defend his surrender. Rigorously researched and unabashedly interpretive, Stuyvesant Bound makes a major contribution to recovery of the cultural and religious diversity that marked colonial America.