This volume chronicles the facts concerning the relations between the Netherlands in Asia and Japan during the last two years before the outbreak of war in the Pacific and concentrates on political and economic affairs.

One of the first American colonies was New Netherland, established by the Dutch government of the Netherlands more than 160 years before the American Revolution. New Netherland encompassed all of New York, and parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, and Delaware. Early explorers charted land and waterways and claimed them for the Netherlands. They also discovered a profitable trade in furs with Native American tribes. Already successful in trade with Asia, the Dutch established the West India Company to invest in the trade opportunities in America. One of the first things they did was to encourage settlement in New Netherland. People from throughout Europe took advantage of settling in the new colony. According to one governor, Peter Stuyvesant, eighteen different languages were spoken in New Netherland. The Dutch and British had long disagreed about boundaries. These disagreements led to three Anglo-Dutch Wars. In the end, the British took control of New Netherland and renamed it New York. But the Dutch influence on the colony and its people continued.

Tells the fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic Women in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women—both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant—who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President’s house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. Foster showcases the latest research of junior and senior historians, drawing from recent scholarship informed by women’s and gender history—feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Collectively, these essays address the need for scholarship on women’s lives and experiences. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, “add women, and stir,” but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.