New Amsterdam History Center Events

Join us for our unique events

THE NAHC BOOK TALK SERIES

The New Amsterdam History Center is pleased to announce the launch of the NAHC BOOK TALK SERIES. Several times a year, the series will feature authors speaking about their recently published books on a wide variety of topics related to the New Netherland colony and its center in New Amsterdam. These exciting events, which will be presented either online or in person, will introduce audiences to the latest and most interesting books about this important period in our nation’s history.

Discover More

The Dutch World of Washington Irving: Knickerbocker’s History of New York and the Hudson Valley Folktales
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
March 25, 2026
Old Masters, New Amsterdam at The New York Historical featuring NAHC’s 3-D Model of New Amsterdam
Accompanying the exhibition is a digital 3D reimagining of the 1660 Castello Plan. Created in partnership with the New Amsterdam History Center, this interactive map lets visitors step directly into 17th-century New Amsterdam—exploring the interior of the Kierstede House, visiting the original City Hall, the Indian Trading House, and a house where enslaved Africans lived. The map also traces the Lenape trail that would later become Broadway, revealing the living city beneath today’s streets.
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
May 1, 2026
Newcomers -The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York
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.
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
May 13, 2026

PAST EVENTS

New Visions of Old New York – Jan 23 through Dec 19, 2025
Jan 23-Dec 20, 2025 at 31 Chambers Street, 1st Floor Gallery , 9AM – 4PM,. An interactive 3-D map from the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York project alongside 17th century records from the NYC Municipal Archives.
9:00 am - 4:00 pm
December 1, 2025
Debra Bruno, author of A Hudson Valley Reckoning in conversation with Eleanor Mire
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
November 20, 2025
Russell Shorto Talks About His New Book, ‘Taking Manhattan’
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
November 11, 2025
Munsee Lenape Sovereignty And Survival From The 17th Century To The Present
Maeve Kane, Associate Prof. of History at the State University of New York at Albany, will be speaking on Munsee Lenape Sovereignty And Survival From The 17th Century To The Present.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
November 5, 2025
July 3rd for It Happened Here
Join cultureNOW and partners for a hybrid symposium on Nieuw Amsterdam, featuring historians, authors, and cultural leaders exploring the Dutch roots of New York and its enduring historical legacy.
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
July 3, 2025
NYS Archives Partnership Trust: Conflict, Commerce & Cooperation: John Bowne, Petrus Stuyvesant and the Question of Tolerance in 1660s New Amsterdam
Join us for an online event exploring a New Amsterdam prison sentence, a trans-Atlantic voyage, and the Quaker community's fight for religious tolerance in Flushing, New Netherland.
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
April 8, 2025
African, Indigenous, and Dutch Foodways in 17th-century New Amsterdam
Discover the flavors of 17th-century New Netherland! Talks feature historical food bites like corn cakes, braised 'hen,' and beef pasties. Learn Algonkian, African, and Dutch culinary stories from expert speakers.
#Dutch Food, #Indigenous, #African, #Food, #Foodways
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
March 26, 2025
The Slow Death of Slavery in Dutch New York
An exceptionally insightful analysis of slavery in Dutch New York, Douma's research dismantles myths, challenging the notion that Dutch slavery practices were ever "mild" or lenient.
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
February 4, 2025
A Talk with Adam Eaker on his new book on Gesina ter Borch
Adam Eaker's new book Gesina ter Borch is the first full-length study devoted to the best-documented Dutch woman artist of the seventeenth century.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
December 11, 2024
Catalyntje Trico: A Life in New Amsterdam a conversation with author, Lana Waite Holden
In Catalyntje Trico: A Life in New Amsterdam, author Lana Holden offers a vivid re-creation of life in New Amsterdam and New Netherland in the early 17th century.
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
October 24, 2024
Promises and Perils
Many NAHC Trustees count ancestors among the first settlers who settled at the trading post of New Amsterdam and other Dutch settlements in New Netherland. They share their ancestors experiences here.
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
October 9, 2024
Shipwreck and Salvation – The Wreck of The Prince Maurice 1657
A storm, a shipwreck, and rescue on an ice laden beach! Join the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York team as they rebuild the wreck and the rescue using 3D modelling and AI.
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
July 17, 2024
Shipwreck and Salvation – The Wreck of The Prince Maurice 1657
A storm, a shipwreck, and rescue on an ice laden beach! Join the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York team as they rebuild the wreck and the rescue using 3D modelling and AI.
3:00 pm - 4:30 pm
May 18, 2024
Shipwreck and Salvation  – The Wreck of the Prince Maurice 1657
A storm, a shipwreck, and rescue on an ice laden beach! Join the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York team as they rebuild the wreck and the rescue using 3D modelling and AI.
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
May 18, 2024
Shipwreck and Salvation: The Wreck of the Prince Maurice
A storm, a shipwreck, and rescue on an ice laden beach! Join the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York team as they rebuild the wreck and the rescue using 3D modelling and AI.
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
May 17, 2024
Shipwreck and Salvation  – The Wreck of the Prince Maurice 1657 Shelter Island Historical Society, 16 South Ferry Road, Shelter Island, NY
A storm, a shipwreck, and rescue on an ice laden beach! Join the New Amsterdam History Center’s Mapping Early New York team as they rebuild the wreck and the rescue using 3D modelling and AI.
1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
May 16, 2024
Park Avenue Tulips
A gathering at Park Avenue’s Malls to welcome the flowering 80,000 orange tulips chosen by the Park Avenue Fund and Carnegie Hill Neighbors to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the 1624 arrival of the first Dutch settlers. 
6:00 pm - 6:00 pm
May 14, 2024
NAHC & NYBG: Peaches, Pears, and Purslane
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
April 25, 2024
New York Before New York: The Castello Plan of New Amsterdam
Accompanying the exhibition is a digital 3D reimagining of the 1660 Castello Plan. Created in partnership with the New Amsterdam History Center, this interactive map lets visitors step directly into 17th-century New Amsterdam—exploring the interior of the Kierstede House, visiting the original City Hall, the Indian Trading House, and a house where enslaved Africans lived. The map also traces the Lenape trail that would later become Broadway, revealing the living city beneath today’s streets.
11:00 am - 5:00 pm
March 15, 2024
New Netherland’s Slave Trade: Origins, Evolution, Impact, Significance
Join us for this virtual event when three historians challenge the myths and misunderstandings about New Netherland slavery and shed a new light on the colony’s enslaved people: the conditions of their enslavement, the Africans’ relationship with their enslavers, and the inner workings of the trade in slaves.
#enslaved people, #slave
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
November 15, 2023
Camerata Trajectina Concert The Morgan Library, 225 Madison Avenue, New York,NY
This unique ensemble explores the rich music heritage of the Low Countries, dating from the Middle Ages until the early 1600’s.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
October 11, 2023
The Prize Papers Collection – The Vrooman Letters Deutsches House at Columbia University, 420 West 116th Street, New York, NY
Dr. Frans Blom led a discussion on the so-called Prize Papers, a trove of 40,000 commercial and private Dutch letters that were intercepted at sea and brought as intelligence information to England during the wars with the Netherlands.
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
June 13, 2023
Central Park’s Dutch Harlem Charles A. Dana Center, 110th Street, New York, NY
On this 1.5-hour walking tour, historian Sara Cedar Miller, author of Before Central Park, explains why Hendrick and Isaac de Forest and their brother-in-law, Dr. Johannes de la Montagne, chose to live far north of New Amsterdam. Painting by Len Tantillo of the de Forest/Montagne bouwrie.
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
June 6, 2023
The Rediscovery of Jan Lievens’ 1653 Portrait of Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp The Morgan Library, 225 Madison Avenue, New York,NY
The rediscovery of Jan Lievens’ 1653 portrait of Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp and his influence on the founding generations of America
7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
May 16, 2023
Debating the Role of Women in the Dutch Golden Age
Join us to explore the social role of women in New Netherland, Brazil, and other places in the expanding Dutch world of the seventeenth century.
6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
March 28, 2023
The Ice Age in the Dutch North Atlantic
The Dutch Republic experienced its so-called Golden Age from the 16th Century through the 18th Century, during an extended period of variable climate that often included colder temperatures and severe weather events.
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
January 24, 2023
Were There 18 Languages Spoken in New Amsterdam
As part of his forthcoming linguistic history of New York, linguist Ross Perlin explores how the new port, New Amsterdam, was Native American, African, and European from the beginning, with the template for the city’s extraordinary multilingualism thus set at the very start of Dutch rule.
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
October 11, 2022
Mapping Early New York Project
Come explore 17th Century New Netherland with your guide, NAHC Trustee Toya Dubin, director of the MAPPING EARLY NEW YORK project, an innovative approach to telling history.
6:00 pm - 5:30 pm
June 1, 2022
Music of Many Worlds Congregation Shearith Israel, 2 West 70th Street, at Central Park West New York City
Join harpsichordist & scholar Jonathan Salamon, plus an ensemble of baroque instrumentalists and singers, as he performs, explains, and brings to life rarely heard eighteenth-century music from Amsterdam’s Portuguese (Sephardic) Synagogue. Hear the exquisite sounds of celebration and worship by composers Abraham de Caçeres, Cristiano Giuseppe Lidarti, and M. Mani.
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
May 22, 2022
Before Central Park a talk by Sara Cedar Miller Charles A. Dana Center, 110th Street, New York, NY
Visitors can hardly imagine Manhattan without Central Park, but the history of these 843 acres before it became the celebrated green space is a fascinating story told by Sara Cedar Miller, Historian Emerita of the Central Park Conservancy, in her new book, Before Central Park, published by Columbia University Press.
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
May 18, 2022
Mapping Early New York:  A Demonstration
Join NAHC Trustee Toya Dubin for an in-depth exploration of New Amsterdam in the 17th Century. Meet Native American Chief Wampage II, African American Manuel de Gerrit de Reus, Jewish resident Asser Levy, Anthony Salée, aka, « The Turk », and Catalina Trico women's advocate.
6:00 pm - 6:30 pm
January 27, 2022
Dutch American Heritage Day and Networking
On April 19th Dutch-American Friendship Day is celebrated on April 19th, which commemorate the start of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
November 14, 2021
Diversity, Strife, and Toleration in 17th-Century Breukelen
The program introduces little-known Dutch farmer Anthony Jansen van Salée, AKA “The Turk,” the first New Netherland resident of Muslim background, and his feisty Dutch wife Grietje, both expelled by the West India Company to then-frontier Brooklyn.
#Muslim
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
November 9, 2021
The Black Experience in Dutch New York A Virtual Event
There has been an explosion of research into the lives of the Black inhabitants of the Dutch colony of New Netherland in recent years.
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
October 23, 2021
The Diary of Asher Levy- First Jewish Citizen of New York
Asser Levy, the first permanent Jewish resident of Manhattan. Levy fled persecution in Recife, Brazil, arriving in New Amsterdam in 1654, where he helped lead the fight for religious and civil rights that first gave shape to the character of modern-day New York.
#jewish
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
June 8, 2021
New York Loves Vermeer
Join us for an engaging conversation exploring the longstanding love affair between New Yorkers and the art of Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer worked amidst a cultural flowering in the Dutch Republic at the time that New York was still New Amsterdam.
#art
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
May 11, 2021
The Story of an Evolving House Style in America with Jeroen van den Hurk and Len Tantillo
Achitectural historian Jeroen van den Hurk and historical artist Len Tantillo explore how 17th-century architecture from the Dutch Republic was adapted by immigrants in the New World. Painting by Len Tantillo
6:00 pm - 5:30 pm
March 9, 2021
The Five Seasons – The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
In this enchanting 75-minute film Piet takes us on a grand tour of his quietly beautiful gardens. One of the film’s stars is New York’s beloved High Line, in Piet’s words, a late “game changer” in the long career of this master landscaper.
12:00 pm - 12:00 pm
January 1, 2021
Fighting the Flood: Innovative Approaches to New York’s Climate Change Challenges
Join us for a Panel Discussion featuring: Matthijs Bouw, ModeratorFounder, ONE ARCHITECTURE, Pippa Brashear, Principal, SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Daniel Vasini, Creative Director of West 8 NY, Architect and Urban Designer, and Edgar J. Westerhof, National Director for Flood Risk & Resiliency, ARCADIS.
6:30 pm - 7:30 pm
December 20, 2020
New York is a Dutch City: The Enduring Legacy of the 40-year Dutch Rule of New York City
Join us online for a lively discussion of the enduring legacy of the 40-year Dutch rule of New York City, 1624-1664 about how our democratic institutions, rule of law, hyphenated nationality, entrepreneurial spirit, multiculturalism, and vocabulary are indebted to our Dutch origins.
6:00 pm - 5:30 pm
October 6, 2020
“A Dangerous Liberty” Mohawk-Dutch Relations and the Colonial Gunpowder Trade, 1639-1665
“A Dangerous Liberty” - a talk on the Mohawk-Dutch Relations and the Colonial Gunpowder Trade, 1639-1665. Painting by Len Tantillo
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
February 5, 2020
The Lawyer and the Fox: A Tale of Tricks and Treachery in New Amsterdam
A Talk By Jaap Jacobs, Author and Honorary Reader in History, University of St Andrews will talk about the fierce struggle between Adriaen van der Donck, and Petrus Stuyvesant in New Netherland. But the roots of their enmity lay in the distant Netherlands.
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
October 3, 2019
Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills; The Old Dutch Church; The Old Dutch Burial Ground, 6/7/2019
A visit to Philipsburg Manor Upper Mills in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a nationally significant colonial milling and trading complex, was formerly owned by a Dutch merchant family.
10:30 am - 2:30 pm
June 7, 2019
Cartographic Visions of New Netherland & New Amsterdam: Depictions of Resources and Peoples
In this lecture Ian will take us on an exploration of the history of the shifting populations of Manhattan Island, from the Lenape, through the Dutch, and onto modern times, using maps representing the land as interpreted by these groups.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
April 9, 2019
In Praise of Painting Dutch Masterpieces at The MET
Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century—the Golden Age of Rembrandt, Hals, and Vermeer—have been a highlight of The Met collection since the Museum’s founding purchase in 1871.
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
January 28, 2019
Was New Amsterdam’s Reputation for Religious Tolerance Earned? An Atlantic Perspective
Presentations and discussion on New Amsterdam and religious toleration, featuring Noah Gelfand and Danny Noorlander.
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
November 8, 2018
The Vander-Ende – Onderdonk House
The history of the Dutch within present-day New York City has long been overshadowed by the British in our popular historical narrative. However, Dutch influences and contributions remain throughout the physical and cultural landscape.
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
May 10, 2018
New Amsterdam in the Dutch Atlantic
A Dialogue About Trade and Entrepreneurship on the 17th Century World Stage in New Amsterdam
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
November 6, 2017
The Bowne House Historical Society
A tour of the Bowne House, built by John Bowne circa 1661 or earlier, is the oldest house in Queens, which is New World Dutch and English architectural traditions of building,
11:00 am - 1:30 am
October 3, 2017
The Archeology of New Amsterdam and Its Environs
A lecture and slide show about the archaeology of New Netherland in the greater New York area, including sites in Manhattan and the four boroughs.
1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
June 9, 2017
The Dutch Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art
The tour will be led by Adam Eaker, Assistant Curator of European Paintings to view The Dutch Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Painting by Len Tantillo
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
March 9, 2017
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
November 3, 2016
Dutch Day at the New York Botanical Garden
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
March 31, 2016
New York City and Water: A Historical Perspective
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
October 26, 2015
New Netherland Through History and Art
Historian Charles Gehring and historical artist Len Tantillo provided an overview of the 17th century Dutch colony that became New York.
#art
6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
April 21, 2015
Patroons and Plowmen, Pietism and Politics: Dutch Settlers in the Hudson Valley by Firth Fabend
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
April 15, 2015