Map, left:  Novi Belgii (Map of New Netherland, with inset view of New Amsterdam), 1655; C. Danckerts. The CITCO Collection
New Netherland (Dutch: Nieuw-Nederland, Latin: Novi Belgii, Nova Belgica or Novum Belgium) was a 17th-century colonial province of the Seven United Netherlands that was located on the East Coast of North America. The claimed territories extended from the Delmarva Peninsula to extreme southwestern Cape Cod, while the more limited settled areas are now part of the Mid-Atlantic States of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut, with small outposts in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
The colony was conceived as a private business venture to exploit the North American fur trade. During its first decades, New Netherland was settled rather slowly, partially as a result of policy mismanagement by the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and partially as a result of conflicts with Native Americans. The settlement of New Sweden encroached on its southern flank, while its northern border was re-drawn to accommodate an expanding New England. During the 1650s, the colony experienced dramatic growth and became a major port for trade in the North Atlantic. The surrender of Fort Amsterdam to England in 1664 was formalized in 1667, contributing to the Second Anglo–Dutch War. In 1673, the Dutch re-took the area but relinquished it under the Second Treaty of Westminster ending the Third Anglo-Dutch War the next year.
The inhabitants of New Netherland were Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans, the last chiefly imported as enslaved laborers. Descendants of the original settlers played a prominent role in colonial America. For two centuries, New Netherland Dutch culture characterized the region (today's Capital District around Albany, the Hudson Valley, western Long Island, northeastern New Jersey, and New York City).
 
JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
 
Hour One
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 1, Block A: FDR's Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance, by Robert Klara  (1 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 1, Block B:  FDR's Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance, by Robert Klara  (2 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 1, Block C: FDR's Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance, by Robert Klara  (3 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 1, Block D: FDR's Funeral Train: A Betrayed Widow, a Soviet Spy, and a Presidency in the Balance, by Robert Klara  (4 of 4)
 
Hour Two
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 2, Block A:  Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, by Ted Steinberg (1 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 2, Block B:  Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, by Ted Steinberg (2 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 2, Block C:  Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, by Ted Steinberg (3 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 2, Block D:  Gotham Unbound: The Ecological History of Greater New York, by Ted Steinberg (4 of 4)  This is the story of the monumental struggle between New York and the natural world. From Henry Hudson’s discovery of Mannahatta to Hurricane Sandy, Gotham Unbound is Ted Steinberg’s sweeping ecological history of one of the most man-made spots on Earth.  Here is a tale of “the world with us”—lots of us—a groundbreaking book that recounts the four-century history of how hundreds of square miles of open marshlands became home to six per cent of the nation’s population.
Steinberg vividly brings a vanished New York back to life. You’ll see the metropolitan area anew, not just as a dense urban goliath but as an estuary once home to miles of oyster reefs, wolves, whales, and blueberry bog thickets. That world gave way to an onslaught managed by those in power, from Governor John Montgomerie, who turned water into land, and John Randel, who imposed a grid on Manhattan, to Robert Moses, Charles Urstadt, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg.  This book is a powerful account of the relentless development that New Yorkers wrought as they plunged headfirst into the floodplain and transformed untold amounts of salt marsh and shellfish beds into a land jam-packed with people, asphalt and steel, and the reeds and gulls that thrive among them.
With metropolitan areas across the globe on a collision course with rising seas, Gotham Unbound is a penetrating history that helps explain how one of the most important cities in the world wound up in such a perilous situation.
Critical Acclaim: “Steinberg accessibly traces the harbor’s natural history from the booming colonial market in underwater (literally) property and the prescient Manhattan grid plan, both of which fueled development, to the lessons delivered by Hurricane Sandy…. [Steinberg] challenges the conventional arguments that geography is destiny and that New York is an ‘infinite proposition’ — a perpetually renewable resource. And he makes the strong case that for all the ecological advantages of urban living, hyperdensity by itself is not necessarily a sound environmental strategy”– The New York Times
“How did the lush ecosystems of the lower Hudson Valley become one of the world’s premier urban centers, dedicated to the illusion that it could somehow transcend the constraints of the natural world? Ted Steinberg’s explanation in Gotham Unbound is erudite, wise, unfailingly readable–and alarming as hell. This is environmental history at its best, and a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered what lies ahead for New York City.”– Edwin Burrows, coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize winning Gotham
“Magnificently demonstrated in this unique, highly revealing history of Greater New York, prize-winning author Ted Steinberg is a pioneer in the field of ecological history. From Henry Hudson’s magical discoveries in 1609 to Hurricane Sandy’s rampant destruction, Steinberg narrates four centuries of never-ending landed fill-ins, destruction of estuaries, and building. Every page about this eastern landed frontier reveals the world’s leading city from a fresh, crucially important perspective.”– Walter LaFeber, winner of the Bancroft Prize and Tisch University Professor Emeritus, Cornell University, and author of The American Age
“This is the best history of an American city I have read–stunningly original, brilliant in research and argument, delightful to read, and vital for our urban future. Whatever New Yorkers may have achieved in the accumulation of wealth or social wellbeing, they have written a tragic story in ecological terms. Henceforth we will not be able to think of the city without also thinking of it as one of the world’s most damaged estuaries and of the teeming diversity of plant and animal life that once lived here.”– Donald Worster, winner of the Bancroft Prize, University of Kansas and Renmin University of China, author of A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
 
Hour Three
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 3, Block A:  Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristen Iversen (1 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 3, Block B:  Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristen Iversen (2 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 3, Block C:  Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristen Iversen (3 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 3, Block D:  Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristen Iversen (4 of 4)
 
Hour Four
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 4, Block A:  Circle of Treason: CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, by Sandra V. Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille (1 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 4, Block B:  Circle of Treason: CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, by Sandra V. Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille (2 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 4, Block C:  Circle of Treason: CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, by Sandra V. Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille (3 of 4)
Sunday 31 January 2016  / Hour 4, Block D:  Circle of Treason: CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, by Sandra V. Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille (4 of 4)  Amazon review:  Circle of Treason details the authors’ personal involvement in the hunt for and eventual identification of a Soviet mole in the CIA during the 1980s and 1990s. The search for the presumed traitor was necessitated by the loss of almost all of the CIA’s large stable of Soviet intelligence officers working for the United States against their homeland. Aldrich Ames, a long-time acquaintance and co-worker of the authors in the Soviet-East European Division and Counterintelligence Center of CIA, turned out to be that mole. In April 1985 Ames walked in to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D. C. and volunteered to the KGB, working for the Soviet Union for nine years until his arrest by the FBI in February 1994.
Ames was arguably one of the most destructive traitors in American history, and is most well-known for providing information which led to the death of at least 11 Soviet intelligence officers who spied for the West. The authors participated in the majority of these cases and the book provides detailed accounts of the operational contact with the agents as well as other similar important cases with which the authors also had personal involvement. The stories of the brave men who were executed or imprisoned by the Soviet Union include GRU General Dmitriy Fedorovich Polyakov, KGB Colonel Leonid Georgiyevich Poleshchuk, KGB Colonel Vladimir Mikhaylovich Piguzov, GRU technical officer Nikolay Chernov, GRU Lieutenant Colonel Boris Nikolayevich Yuzhin, KGB scientific and technical officer Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, GRU Colonel Vladimir Mikhaylovich Vasilyev, GRU officer Gennadiy Aleksandrovich Smetanin, KGB illegals support officer Gennadiy Grigoryevich Varenik, KGB scientific and technical officer Valeriy Fedorovich Martynov, KGB political intelligence officer Sergey Mikhaylovich Motorin, KGB officer Sergey Vorontsov, and Soviet scientist Adolf Grigoryevich Tolkachev. Other operations include KGB technical officer Viktor Ivanovich Sheymov, GRU Colonel Sergey Ivanovich Bokhan, and KGB Colonel Aleksey Isidorovich Kulak. Of particular note in the preceding list of agents compromised by Aldrich Ames is GRU General Dmitriy Fedorovich Polyakov, the highest-ranking spy ever run by the U.S. government against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Described as the “Crown Jewel”, he provided the U.S. with a treasure trove of information during his 20-plus year history of cooperation.
The book also covers the aftermath of Aldrich Ames arrest: the Congressional wrath on CIA for not identifying him sooner; FBI/CIA debriefings of Ames following his plea bargain; a retrospective of Ames the person and Ames the spy; and a comparison of Ames and FBI special agent and Soviet spy Robert Hanssen, arrested in February 2001 and sentenced to life in prison for spying for the Soviet Union against the U.S. for over 20 years. Although not personally involved in the Hanssen investigation, the two authors were peripherally involved in what became, after many false starts the Hanssen case.
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