TY - BOOK AU - Merwick,Donna TI - Death of a Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York SN - 9781501728815 U1 - 347.747/016 21 PY - 2018///] CY - Ithaca, NY PB - Cornell University Press KW - Notaries KW - New York (State) KW - Biography KW - History KW - New York History KW - U.S. History KW - HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY, PA) KW - bisacsh KW - 17th century american history KW - 17th century history KW - 17th-century Albany KW - Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam KW - American historians KW - Colonial social history KW - Dutch in the New World KW - Dutch-English influence in New York KW - american colonial period KW - american colonies KW - american history studies KW - beverwijck KW - biography of colonists KW - biography of new yorker KW - colonial new york KW - colonial notaries KW - colonial period history KW - daily life in the new colony KW - dutch americans KW - dutch colony KW - graduate history collections KW - graduate history KW - historians KW - historical notaries KW - history KW - history of albany new york KW - history of new york KW - manhatans KW - new ablanij KW - new england history KW - new york state history KW - nieuw albanij in america KW - notaries as archivists KW - notaries history N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Illustrations --; Acknowledgments --; Epitaph --; 1. "New Albanij" --; 2. Patria --; 3. The Manhatans --; 4. Beverwijck --; 5. Beverwijck: The Final Years --; 6. Albany --; 7. "Nieuw Albanij in America" --; 8. The Costs of Conquest --; Notes and Reflections --; References --; Index; restricted access N2 - "He was the only one. He was the only man to have committed suicide in the town's seventeenth-century history." So begins Donna Merwick's fascinating tale of a Dutch notary who ended his life in his adopted community of Albany. In a major feat of historical reconstruction, she introduces us to Adriaen Janse van Ilpendam and the long-forgotten world he inhabited in Holland's North American colony. Her powerful narrative will make readers care for this quiet and studious man, an "ordinary" settler for whom the clash of empires brought tragedy.Like so many of his fellow countrymen, Janse left his Dutch homeland as a young adult to try his luck in New Netherland. After spending a few years on Manhattan Island, he moved on to the fur trading settlement today known as Albany. Merwick traces his journey to a new continent and re-creates the satisfying existence this respected burgher enjoyed with his wife in the bustling town. As a notary Janse was, in the author's words, "surrounded by stories, those he listened to and recorded, the hundreds he archived in a chest or trunk." His familiar life was turned upside down by the British conquest of the colony. Merwick recounts the changes brought about by the new rulers and imagines the despair Janse must have felt when English, a language he had never learned, replaced his native tongue in official transactions. In any military adventure, truth is alleged to be the first casualty. Merwick offers a poignant reminder that the first casualties are in fact people. As much a musing on what history obscures as what it reveals, her book is a superior work by a master practitioner of her craft UR - https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501728815 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9781501728815 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9781501728815/original ER -