Diversity, Strife, and Toleration in 17th-Century Breukelen
Join the New Amsterdam History Center and the Center for Brooklyn Conversation in an online conversation with Alan Mikhail (Yale University), Eric Platt (St. Francis College in Brooklyn) and moderator Dr. Julie Golia (Curator, New York Public Library).
17th-century Breukelen was notable for squabbling neighbors, and as a test site for tolerance. Join us to explore the history of early settlement near today’s Coney Island in Brooklyn, where tensions arose between the Dutch and the “dangerous” Lady Deborah Moody’s English community at Gravesend. The program introduces little-known Dutch farmer Anthony Jansen van Salée, AKA “The Turk,” the first New Netherland resident of Muslim background, and his Dutch wife Grietje, both expelled by the West India Company to then-frontier Brooklyn – considered the perfect destination for suspect miscreants.
Register for the event here. The progam will continue to be available on Vimeo from November 11 to November 31. A new link will be sent to ticket holders.
About The Panelists
Alan Mikhail, Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University, and Chair of the Department of History, is widely recognized for his work in Middle Eastern and global history. He is the author of four books and over thirty scholarly articles, and in 2018 received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for internationally distinguished humanities scholars and social scientists. His latest book is God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World. Professor Mikhail’s writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Eric Platt, Associate Professor of History and Chair of the Department of Economics, History, and Political Science at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, is an expert in 17th-century Brooklyn history. His book, Britain and the Bestandstwisten: The Causes, Course and Consequences of British Involvement in the Dutch Religious and Political Disputes of the Early Seventeenth Century, was published in 2015. He is currently working on his second book, a study of Lady Deborah Moody and the early history of Gravesend, which settlement she founded in the mid-17th century in what is now Brooklyn.
Julie Golia is Curator of History, Social Sciences, and Government Information at The New York Public Library. She was previously Vice President for Curatorial Affairs and Collections at Brooklyn Historical Society (now the Center for Brooklyn History). Dr. Golia is the author of Newspaper Confessions: A History of Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age (Oxford University Press, 2021).