The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century

Acknowledgments

ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience! —Herman Melville, “Cetology,” Moby-Dick The idea for this book was born in the late-twentieth-century Delaware Valley at a short distance from the Schuylkill River. Since then the pursuit of that idea has taken me to many places and left me with many debts. Time and again others have aided me so that I might be able to undertake and complete this book. Perhaps, then, we should add “Gratitude” to Ishmael’s plea. The project began when I was a doctoral student in the Department of History at The Johns Hopkins University, which provided me with a Lovejoy Fellowship in my first year. Subsequent support for my studies came from the United States Department of Education’s generous Jacob K. Javits Fellowship . I presented early versions of parts of this book at the Research Seminar in Early Modern Colonial British America, led by Jack Greene, my mentor then and now. His support has always meant a lot to me. The participants in those seminars offered sharp advice and critique that shaped the arguments I have developed in this book. They were, and are, good friends. At Johns Hopkins I learned a great deal as well from my seminars with Michael Johnson, who continues to suggest fresh ways to think about my work. I later found a home in Philadelphia at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Led by Richard Dunn and then Daniel Richter, the McNeil Center provided me with office space, library privileges, and even travel support. Its associated faculty and many fellows made it a very stimulating place to x AcknowledgmentS work. It was there that I met Evan Haefeli, who introduced me to the Dutch and Swedes in the seventeenth-century Delaware Valley and continues to offer help and guidance. At the University of Pennsylvania Robert Naborn graciously gave me my first formal lessons in reading Dutch. Daniel Richter later offered useful advice for revising the manuscript. I wrote, and rewrote, most of this book when I was a member of the Department of History at Louisiana State University (LSU). The university provided support in the form of research and travel grants from the Office of Research and Graduate Studies and a release from teaching. Those grants allowed me to conduct extended research into the Dutch and Swedish materials housed at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the New York State Archives, where I was later a Larry J. Hackman Research Fellow. Upstairs from the archive, Charles Gehring, the director of the New Netherland Project, gave me advice on my project, answered obscure questions, and freely shared his and Janny Venema’s invaluable transcriptions and translations. With the support of the LSU College of Arts and Sciences and an Andrew W. Mellon Long-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship from the John Carter Brown (JCB) Library, I was able to spend a year deepening and reshaping my manuscript. The JCB’s director, Ted Widmer; staff members Valerie Andrews and Maureen O’Donnell; and librarians Susan Danforth, Dennis Landis, and Ken Ward were universally helpful. I especially enjoyed working alongside fellows Paul Cohen, Anoush Terjanian, and Sam Truett and attending the library’s weekly luncheons and fellows’ presentations with Amy Bushnell and Jack Greene. Back at LSU I benefited from the help and camaraderie of many people (and their spouses) while I put together the manuscript. In particular I must thank Tiwanna Simpson, Chuck Shindo, Michael Fontenot, Maribel Dietz, Jordan Kellman, Christine Kooi, Steve and Yolanda Ross, John and Sylvia Rodrigue, Reza Pirbhai, Reem Meshal, Carolyn Lewis, Margherita Zanasi, Meredith Veldman, Nancy Isenstein, Alecia Long, Victor Stater, Paul Hoffman , John Henderson, Court Carney, Colin Woodward, Rand Dotson, Katie Henninger, Bill Boelhower, Andrew Sluyter, Kent Mathewson, Mark Martin, and Darlene Albritton. Special thanks go to Andrew Burstein, who helped me turn the manuscript into a book. Across campus at LSU Press, Alisa Plant offered early and strong support for my work and patiently shepherded the book to press. Mary Lee Eggart worked hard to translate the long list of features I gave her into a clear, elegant map. As the book’s copyeditor, Elizabeth Gratch showed me what craftsmanship truly means. AcknowledgmentS xi Since coming to the University of Groningen in 2010, where final revisions of the manuscript were completed, I have had the chance to travel through the homelands of Peter Minuit and Pieter Stuyvesant, to stroll along...