Volume 28 provides a translation of the oldest existing deacons' account book found in Albany, New York's Dutch Reformed Church. Complete with background information on Albany's colonial community and the founding of the area's first church, this volume will be of great interest to church historians and genealogists as well as to the Reformed church at large.

Winner of the 2004 Annual Archives Award for Excellence in Research Using the Holdings of the New York State Archives presented by the Board of Regents and the New State York Archives Beverwijck explores the rich history and Dutch heritage of one of North America's oldest cities—Albany, New York. Drawing on documents translated from the colonial Dutch as well as maps, architectural drawings, and English-language sources, Janny Venema paints a lively picture of everyday life in colonial America. In 1652, Petrus Stuyvesant, director general of New Netherland, established a court at Fort Orange, on the west side of New York State's upper Hudson River. The area within three thousand feet of the fort became the village of Beverwijck. From the time of its establishment until 1664, when the English conquered New Netherland and changed the name of the settlement to Albany, Beverwijck underwent rapid development as newly wealthy traders, craftsmen, and other workers built houses, roads, bridges, and a school, as well as a number of inns. A well-organized system of poor relief also helped less wealthy settlers survive in the harsh colonial conditions. Venema's careful research shows that although Beverwijck resembled villages in the Dutch Republic in many ways, it quickly took on features of the new, "American" society that was already coming into being.

The story begins in Europe, with a brief history of the church out of which the Reformation grew. The scene then shifts to New Amsterdam in 1628, where a miniscule church survived the English conquest and eventually grew into the Reformed Church in America. By Grace Alone follows its story into the twenty-first century. In addition to the sequential story of the Reformed Church's development, there are vignettes of people involved in events small and great - from the diary of a frail young woman who survived near calamity at sea but ended her life at eighty-one, the widow of the president of Queen's College, to the boy from a farm in Iowa who built the Crystal Cathedral. The reader will also be helped by timelines in every chapter, as well as a glossary, an index, and many illuminating illustrations.

The story of New Baltimore, New York, a small Hudson River town, and how outside pressures and local hard work have combined to forge a lasting community

Invading Paradise: Esopus Settlers at War with Natives, 1659, 1663 reopens and redirects debate about causes of the two Esopus Wars in what are now Kingston and Hurley, New York. Historical studies are found inadequate to explain the conflict and its genocidal outcome. If causality is ever to be reliably decided, the principal actors in this colonial drama need study. Records of aboriginals are understandably scant, while those of settlers are full enough to give impressions of their motivations and attitudes to the frontier. This study is the first to introduce as individuals the main European immigrants involved in the wars. Were they prepared for what confronted them upon acquiring native agricultural lands? Readers are invited to consider exactly what happened to bring on violence.

The history of early America cannot be told without considering unfree labor. At the center of this history are African and Native American adults forced into slavery; the children born to these unfree persons usually inherited their parents' status. Immigrant indentured servants, many of whom were young people, are widely recognized as part of early American society. Less familiar is the idea of free children being taken from the homes where they were born and put into bondage. As Children Bound to Labor makes clear, pauper apprenticeship was an important source of labor in early America. The economic, social, and political development of the colonies and then the states cannot be told properly without taking them into account. Binding out pauper apprentices was a widespread practice throughout the colonies from Massachusetts to South Carolina-poor, illegitimate, orphaned, abandoned, or abused children were raised to adulthood in a legal condition of indentured servitude. Most of these children were without resources and often without advocates. Local officials undertook the responsibility for putting such children in family situations where the child was expected to work, while the master provided education and basic living needs. The authors of Children Bound to Labor show the various ways in which pauper apprentices were important to the economic, social, and political structure of early America, and how the practice shaped such key relations as master-servant, parent-child, and family-state in the young republic. In considering the practice in English, Dutch, and French communities in North America from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Children Bound to Labor even suggests that this widespread practice was notable as a positive means of maintaining social stability and encouraging economic development.

This biography recalls the fascinating life of the second Reformed minister of New Amsterdam (New York), from his mystical experience as a 15-year old orphan in Holland until his tragic death as a spokesman of the opposition during Kieft's War.

New Netherland's distinctive regional history as well as the colony's many relationships with Europe and the seventeenth-century Atlantic world are featured in the second collection of papers from the widely praised annual Rensselaerwijck Seminar. Leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic critique and offer the latest research on a dynamic range of topics: the age of exploration, domestic life in New Netherland, the history and significance of the West India Company, the complex era of Jacob Leisler, the southern frontier lands of the colony, relations with New England, Dutch foodways in the Hudson Valley and their use of beer, the endurance of the Dutch legacy into 19th century New York, and contemporary genealogical research on colonial Dutch ancestors. Cogent and informative, these papers are an indispensable source for better understanding the lives and legacies of the long ago New Netherland colony.