In scarcely 200 pages, Professor Kuhns has surveyed the factors that compelled roughly 100,000 emigrants from the Palatinate, Wurtenberg, Zweibrucken, and other principalities in southern Germany to settle in Pennsylvania between 1683 and 1776 and establish a new way of life in their adopted homeland. Most of these immigrants were farmers, and their customs and manners are recounted in an examination of housing, provisions, agricultural methods, superstitions, and so forth. There is a chapter on language, literature, and education and a separate appendix on German family names. Perhaps the most informative chapter in the book covers the extraordinarily diverse religious life of these Protestant Germans, which, while dominated by the Lutheran and Reformed churches, also accommodated Moravians, Mennonites, Brethren, Dunkards, Seventh-Day Baptists, Schwenckfelders, and others.

Records Of The Reformed Dutch Church In New Amsterdam And New York: Marriages From 11 December, 1639, To 26 August, 1801 (Volume I)has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

From its earliest days under English rule, New York City had an unusually diverse ethnic makeup, with substantial numbers of Dutch, English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, and Jewish immigrants, as well as a large African-American population. Joyce Goodfriend paints a vivid portrait of this society, exploring the meaning of ethnicity in early America and showing how colonial settlers of varying backgrounds worked out a basis for coexistence. She argues that, contrary to the prevalent notion of rapid Anglicization, ethnicity proved an enduring force in this small urban society well into the eighteenth century.

In Spaces of Enslavement, Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies. In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and founded communities from New Amsterdam in the south to Beverwijck near the terminus of the navigable river. When Dutch power in North America collapsed and the colony came under English control in 1664, Dutch descendants continued to rely on enslaved labor. Until 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York State, slavery expanded in the region, with all free New Yorkers benefitting from that servitude. Mosterman describes how the movements of enslaved persons were controlled in homes and in public spaces such as workshops, courts, and churches. She addresses how enslaved people responded to regimes of control by escaping from or modifying these spaces so as to expand their activities within them. Through a close analysis of homes, churches, and public spaces, Mosterman shows that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region's Dutch communities were engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who found ways to claim freedom and resist oppression. Spaces of Enslavement writes a critical and overdue chapter on the place of slavery and resistance in the colony and young state of New York.