Danny Noorlander, Visiting Assistant Professor History

At Faculty Forum I will present my recent research on the seventeenth-century Dutch experience in the Atlantic world. More specifically, I will talk about the Calvinist ministers who worked for the Dutch West India Company in Africa and America. Most Americans know the Dutch, if they know them at all, through their short-lived colony at New Amsterdam, where they participated in the fur trade and struggled to keep up with English neighbors. Today the colony is sometimes studied less for its own sake, more for the purpose of drawing problematic contrasts with those neighbors: settlers vs. traders, intolerant vs. tolerant, religious vs. secular (or just indifferent), and so on. I will discuss the shortcomings of a national approach to the colonial past, put New Amsterdam in its proper imperial context, and demonstrate the place of religious ideology and religious mission even in a so-called “seaborne” or “commercial empire.”

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Hot buffet lunch will be available beginning at 12:00 noon. To assure a proper count, please rsvp to Sheila Gustafson at gustafss@beloit.edu or call ext. 2667.

This event is open to Beloit College faculty and staff only.