The New York State Historical Association’s quarterly, New York History Summer 2011 edition featured the following articles:
Merging the Two Streams of Migration to New Netherland
by Joyce Goodfriend
The article highlights migration to New Netherland by Africans forcibly brought for the slave trade. The author argues that past historiography of immigration to the Dutch colony unwarrantably neglects the Africans’ experience as not comparable to that of free immigrants and that this should be corrected in future research.
Conspiracy Politics in the Election of 1796
by Donald Heidenreich
A study of how Alexander Hamilton’s involvement in the presidential election of 1796 (won by John Adams) , often described as a conspiracy to elect Thomas Pinckney over Adams, was less about Hamilton’s animus against Adams and more about his fear that an anti-Federalist, specifically Thomas Jefferson, would win.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, New Yorker
by Reynolds Scott-Childress
Scott-Childress discusses African American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s efforts to create a sense of self in the years surrounding the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and notes that they suggest “strikingly different ways of thinking about race than the black-white binary that would strangle American social thinking after 1900. During the years of Dunbar’s brief career as the nation’s most popular poet, from 1896 to his death in 1906, the racial concepts of ‘black’ and ‘white’ had yet to take on the seemingly universal, immutable, biological essence that they held for Americans throughout most of the twentieth century.”