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Review Quotes:
Regarded by their fellow-colonists as 'sinful moral outsiders, ' van Salee and Reyniers were banished from the colony's mainstay on Manhattan and forced to live on Long Island. It was there, by means of a war that the colony waged on Native people, that the couple forged new reputations as defenders and 'anchors' of Dutch settlement, accruing property, hiring laborers, and joining the ranks of the landed élite....[A] powerful biography.-- "The New Yorker"
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Although
Newcomers is most likely to endure as the most accomplished scholarly work on Anthony van Salee, it will also most definitely impress readers with its edifying literary style and perfectly curated prose....This is what is ultimately striking about
Newcomers--it speaks to all new Americans who fall outside the nation's main genealogical narrative.--Anouar Majid "Tingis Magazine"
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In
Newcomers, Alan Mikhail tells the rollicking tale of two of New York's most misunderstood founders: Anthony 'the Turk' and Grietje Reyniers. Combining detailed research and riveting storytelling, this book promises to change the way we understand Colonial Gotham's formative first years.--Susanah Shaw Romney, New York University, author of New Netherland Connections
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Alan Mikhail rescues two of the most intriguing figures of New Netherland from the farthest margins of history, giving Anthony 'van Salee' and Grietje Reyniers center stage as actors in their own remarkable story. Through meticulous research, he reconstructs the lives of the couple--figures of grit and determination who were despised as 'other' but rose to power and prominence in their adopted American home. Was Grietje really New Amsterdam's proudly defiant prime prostitute? Was Anthony America's first Muslim--or even Muslim at all? Mikhail tackles the myths head-on, and provides a concise, engaging account that is as revealing as it is readable.--Russell Shorto, New York Times best-selling author of The Island at the Center of the World and Taking Manhattan
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Alan Mikhail reveals the captivating story of Anthony and Grietje--a couple from across the Atlantic who carved out success against all odds in seventeenth-century New Amsterdam. Their motley lives embodied the grit and diversity that would come to define the spirit of New York.--Wendy Warren, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist New England Bound
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Alan Mikhail brings to life the history of New York before New York, told through the story of two outcasts from Amsterdam--he who was called a Muslim but was not, she a former barmaid and occasional sex worker--who were among the first settlers of the Dutch colony of New Netherlands. Anthony and Grietje start a farm in lower Manhattan, but they brawl with neighbors and thumb their noses at colonial authorities, so they are banished to 'Breukelen.' Their banishment is also a colonial toehold for native dispossession and, with it, opportunity for personal prosperity and political redemption.
Newcomers is both an astonishing tale of how the hardscrabble reinvent themselves in the New World and an honest account of the dynamics of colonial prejudices and the violence of slavery and dispossession.--Mae Ngai, author of The Chinese Question
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A spectacular feat of historical research and recovery,
Newcomers energetically assembles the scattered pieces of an engaging puzzle: the life and times of Anthony the Turk--an assumed corsair from North Africa--and his wife Grietje--a former Amsterdam sex worker--in, of all places, the New York and Brooklyn of the seventeenth century. Alan Mikhail not only acquaints us with a fascinating and improbable couple; he also unearths, in all of its lusty glory, a formative moment in our history.
Newcomers illuminates a vibrant, teeming story of ambition, struggle, and hard-won success, unfolding in a world that the standard accounts banish to the footnotes. So you thought you knew the seventeenth century? Think again!--John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Eden's Outcasts
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Widely researched and written in a winning style, Alan Mikhail's
Newcomers tells of the Netherland-North Africa-North America triangle in the early seventeenth century. It traces the lives of a star-tossed couple from Amsterdam to the violent project of Dutch colonialism, the clash with Native Americans, and the ongoing slave trade, all under the cloud of anti-Islamic racism.
Newcomers is erudite and challenging, telling the fascinating but grim story of the first New Netherlanders of Manhattan and Long Island.--Nabil Matar, professor of English at the University of Minnesota
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In
Newcomers, a well-researched, poetically written book, Alan Mikhail tells the intriguing story of two seventeenth-century rolling stones: Anthony 'the Turk, ' a former pirate, and his wife, Grietje, formerly a barmaid and sex worker. The narrative deserves readership on both sides of the Atlantic, as it illuminates a model of becoming a hyphenated American, outside of the categories of Black, Native, and white. The significance of the narrative lies in the place of Islam, as ascribed to Anthony, in the early modern Atlantic world.--Gloria Wekker, emerita professor of gender and ethnicity at Utrecht University and author of White Innocence
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Mikhail's book brims with details....The lives of Anthony and Grietje comprise a Very American Story, in which a onetime maidservant and prostitute and a man of obscure antecedents became masters of their own destiny.--Tunku Varadarajan "Wall Street Journal"
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Newcomers is a fascinating story about two of New York's most influential, and forgotten, founders....The story of how this rowdy couple's descendants would become Vanderbilts and American presidents. While Marcus Aurelius would have disapproved of the couple's character, the obstacle of being banished to Brooklyn became their path to fortune. 'What stands in the way becomes the way.'--Joe Scarborough "MS NOW"
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A nuanced portrait of a notable couple whose boundary-breaking lives in 17th-century New York elude pat categorization . . . . [Mikhail's] stalwart archival work points out the shortcomings of histories that overlook 'the hustlers, sexually open, racially ambiguous, and otherwise in-between figures.' Mining centuries-old records for fascinating details about diversity and subjugation in Dutch colonial North America.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
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Meticulously researched and vividly written . . . . As Mikhail shows in his illuminating history, Anthony and Grietje Jansen van Salee's 'New York before it became New York embodies much of what would become the city's mythos as a place of reinvention and recreation, where immigrants changed names and religions and forged bonds across ethnic and racial lines.' . . . . Mikhail depicts the couple's toughness, adaptability and fortitude in order to tell a story that complicates the accepted narrative of America's origins. . . . To understand the reality of North America's colonization--and, indeed, our nation's nascency--we must dig into these narratives. Eye-opening, engaging and fascinating,
Newcomers does just that.--Roger Bishop "Bookpage"
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Historian Alan Mikhail's
Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York is the best kind of history book: one that blends deep, original research with vivid and humane prose to tell a story that upends our previously held beliefs.--Kate Tuttle "Boston Globe"
Publisher Marketing:
A man thought to be a Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid fleeing poverty are hardly the images we have of America's august founders. In Newcomers, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of America's origins through the revelatory tale of a seventeenth-century immigrant couple by the names of Anthony and Grietje.
Married in Amsterdam, the destitute pair emerged from lives of piracy and prostitution in Europe and arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to build a new life. Upon landing on New York City's shores, the swarthy Anthony was attacked for being the Muslim he was not, while Grietje, branded a whore by crude harbor denizens, would become the model of an independent colonial American woman, defiantly mooning her attackers rather than accepting their derision. They endured intense bigotry on crooked neighborhood warrens and in the primitive watering holes of New Amsterdam, battling Dutch authorities and brawling with their neighbors, their appearances in court so frequent that their rebellious existence is seared into the records of early America forever. Eventually ejected from New Amsterdam by Dutch authorities in 1639, they were exiled to the "frontier," to what is now Gravesend Brooklyn, where they and their four daughters farmed and seized land from Native Americans while fighting English colonists from the north. After Grietje died, Anthony moved back to what had become English Manhattan and ended up being one of the richest men in seventeenth-century New York. What is ironic is that this rowdy couple's descendants include some of the most distinguished names in American social and political history, among them the Vanderbilts and President Warren G. Harding.
"Through meticulous research" (Russell Shorto), Mikhail has done nothing less than reframe America's original family story, in the process showing that where we have immigration, prejudice trails never far behind. Indeed, we learn of harsh, anti-Muslim sentiment through Anthony and of female defiance, rare that it was, through Grietje. "Promising to change the way we understand Colonial Gotham's formative first years" (Susanah Shaw Romney), Alan Mikhail's Newcomers tells the story of America's fledgling beginnings in a way that it has never been depicted before.
Review Citations:
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Kirkus Reviews 06/01/2026 (EAN 9781324095835, Hardcover)
Contributor Bio:Mikhail, Alan
Alan Mikhail is the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of six books that have been translated into ten languages.
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