Catalyntje Trico: A Life in New Amsterdam

Thu, Oct 24 - Thu, Oct 24  2024

Online

The New Amsterdam History Center presents this online program about the book "In Catalyntje Trico: A Life in New Amsterdam." Author Lana Holden offers us a vivid re-creation of life in New Amsterdam and New Netherland in the early 17th Century.

This online event follows Catalyntje from 1623 when she leaves Amsterdam, until her death in 1689, “She was the only European who lived in this settlement from the first day colonists stepped off the ship until the English took over forty years later”, the author writes in her preface. Her life opens a window to New Netherland.

Escaping the violence of the Spanish Inquisition in the 1600s, Catalyntje Trico follows an unexpected path to the Dutch Colony of New Netherland. Creating a life in the New World her family faces war, weather, and death. Her poignant story is a tapestry woven with courage, determination, and love. It is a powerful reminder of the profound impact our individual lives can have on others, even for generations to come.

More details and registration here.

Speakers:

Lana Waite Holden is an author, historian and educator at Sweet Home Junior High School Department of History and Language Arts. Although she lives in the Pacific Northwest, she is deeply interested in the Dutch Colony of New Netherland. Her joy in researching and crafting stories, and her avid interest in the history of women and other marginalized groups, led her to publish the historical fiction work on Catalyntje Trico and her life in New Amsterdam. She has shared articles and lesson plans with the New Netherland Institute (NNI) and several years ago, she was invited to speak at a NNI’s annual conference where she presented a paper about Catalyntje Trico. Ms. Holden has also served as the Educational Director of the East Linn Museum, in Oregon where her work focused on the Kalapuya tribe, who are native to the valley near where she lives.

Amy Ransford is Assistant Editor for the Journal of American History and Visiting Assistant Professor in History at Indiana University where teaches courses on early American history, Revolutionary America, women’s and gender history, and the history of piracy. Ransford’s current book project analyzes entangled kinship and trade networks of the present-day Hudson River Watershed over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She is especially interested in the ways in which Native, African, and European women exercised economic and political power as traders, merchants, and business owners, and how their commercial and productive activities were central to the long process of colonization. Her research braids together Dutch, English, and French colonial archives with archaeology, ethnography, and Native American oral tradition.