Description
We are excited to announce that American historian Alain Mikhail will be giving a lecture about his new book Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York on Tuesday May 19th at 6:00pm ET. This will be a hybrid event taking place at our Holland Society Library with livestream access via Zoom.
Alan Mikhail, the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University, is a widely recognized historian of the early modern Muslim world. Across six books, over thirty scholarly articles, and dozens of essays and reviews, he has helped to establish the field of Middle East environmental history, positioned the Ottoman Empire at the center of global early modern history, and written creatively about the place of the archive in the making of past and present. In addition to his books, he has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and Time.
In this new book Newcomers to be published in May, Alain Mikhail focuses on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America. It is the exceptional tale of an unorthodox, seventeenth–century married couple whose rags-to-riches story fundamentally rewrites our knowledge of American history at its very beginnings. A man thought to be Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid are hardly the image we have of America’s founders and this book provides revelatory insights into the seventeenth-century origins of New York.
In Newcomers, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of American beginnings through the tale of Anthony “the Turk” and Grietje Reyniers. Married in Amsterdam, they arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to forge a new life. Always outsiders in the young colony, they battled Dutch authorities, brawled with neighbors, and seized land from Native Americans. In this revisionist portrait of the early American family, we learn of anti-Muslim sentiment through Anthony and of female defiance through Grietje. Eventually banished from Manhattan to Long Island, Anthony and Grietje farmed, prospered, and raised a family whose descendants included the Vanderbilts and President Harding.
Tickets:
In-person ticket | $30
In-person ticket + copy of Newcomers | $60
Click here to attend the book presentation virtually | $15
Click here to purchase a signed copy of Newcomers | $30