Henry Knox or The Island at the Center of the World

Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution

Author: Mark Puls

Here is a compelling portrait of the Revolutionary War general whose skills as an engineer and artilleryman played a key role in all of George Washington's battles including the Siege of Boston (where his use of cannons at Dorchester Heights won back the city) and the Battle of Trenton (where he was in charge of Washington's crossing of the Delaware River). Knox became an major advocate of the U.S. Constitution and served as the nation’s first Secretary of War. He was co-founder of the U.S. Navy, laid the foundations for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and negotiated treaties and set policy with Native Americans.With nail-biting battle scenes, patriotism and deep understanding of his subject, Mark Puls breathes new life into the American Revolution and firmly assigns Knox to his deserved place in history.

Publishers Weekly

In this brisk, informative biography, journalist and author Puls (Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution) celebrates Gen. Henry Knox, "a remarkably ubiquitous presence during America's founding generation," who has been "curiously overlooked by historians." At age 18, Knox (1750-1806) joined the local Boston militia and became a self-taught "skilled engineer and military tactician." Once the American Revolution began, General Washington appointed Knox to build and lead the army's artillery corps. Knox remained at Washington's side and supervised the 1776 Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware. He went on to command the Yorktown artillery in 1781. The then "youngest major general in the American army" retired to become secretary at war and to lay the basis for a visionary citizen army. Knox later sanctioned the American navy and promoted the creation of a military academy at West Point. His private life was burdened by years of separation from his wife and the untimely deaths of nine of their 12 children. In 1806 Knox died unexpectedly from an infection caused by a chicken bone lodged in his throat. Puls's authoritative and absorbing account of Knox's life is a fitting tribute to General Washington's "indispensable man." (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Read also Power to the People or Whats the Matter with Kansas

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

Author: Russell Shorto

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative–a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan–that transforms our understanding of early America.

The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

The New York Times

Relying on the fruits of Dr. Gehring's enterprise, Mr. Shorto has created far more than an addendum to familiar American history: a book that will permanently alter the way we regard our collective past. Without the adventurous Dutch spirit and the internecine power struggle described here, "the English would probably have swept in before Dutch institutions were established, New York would have become another English New World port town like Boston, and American culture would never have developed as it did." — Janet Maslin

NY Times Sunday Book Review

New York history buffs will be captivated by Shorto's descriptions of Manhattan in its primordial state, of bays full of salmon and oysters, and blue plums and fields of wild strawberries in what is now Midtown. Here the reader may learn, among many other historical tidbits, what the Dutch really paid for Manhattan (it wasn't $24), or the key role that Flushing played in securing freedom of conscience, or why the Knicks wear blue-and-orange uniforms, or how Yonkers, the Hutchinson River and Saw Mill River Parkways, Greenwich Village and Staten Island got their names. Yet Shorto never overwhelms one with trivia, and he writes at all times with passion, verve, nuance and considerable humor. — Kevin Baker

The New York Observer - John Jeremiah Sullivan

This is one of those rare books in the picked-over field of colonial history, a whole new picture, a thrown-open window onto the intra-European struggles for dominance and the disputes over political philosophy that did indeed shape this country. With his full-blooded resurrection of an unfamiliar American patriot, Russell Shorto has made a real contribution...

Publishers Weekly

Drawing on 17th-century Dutch records of New Netherland and its capital, Manhattan, translated by scholar Charles Gehring only in recent decades, Shorto (Gospel Truth) brings to exuberant life the human drama behind the skimpy legend starting with the colony's founding in 1623. Most Americans know little about Dutch Manhattan beyond its first director, Peter Minuit, who made the infamous $24 deal with the Indians, and Peter Stuyvesant, the stern governor who lost the island to the English in 1664. These two seminal figures receive their due here, along with a huge cast of equally fascinating characters. But Shorto has a more ambitious agenda: to argue for the huge debt Americans owe to the culture of Dutch Manhattan, the first place in the New World where men and women of different races and creeds lived in relative harmony. The petitions of the colony's citizens for greater autonomy, penned by Dutch-trained lawyer Adriaen van der Donck, represented "one of the earliest expressions of modern political impulses: an insistence by the members of the community that they play a role in their own government." While not discounting the British role in the shaping of American society, the author argues persuasively for the Dutch origins of some of our most cherished beliefs and their roots in "the tolerance debates in Holland" and "the intellectual world of Descartes, Grotius, and Spinoza." Shorto's gracefully written historical account is a must-read for anyone interested in this nation's origins. (Mar. 16) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

For this popular narrative, Shorto (Gospel Truth) draws on some 12,000 public and private documents from a Dutch outpost that archivist Charles Gehring painstakingly translated for researchers in the 1960s. Shorto's resulting portrait of the vibrant society that became New York City is an entrancing one, focusing in particular on the oppositional forces of the controlling Peter Stuyvesant and the more tolerant Adriaen Van der Donck, bringing the latter, lesser-known colonial officer to light. The author exaggerates in asserting that the diversity of Dutch New York and its lasting effects on American character traits have been overlooked before his project. (See Philip Greven's 1977 study, The Protestant Temperament). However, Shorto does correctly point out that Dutch tolerance, a "grudging acceptance," was far from a belief in equality but nevertheless was forward-looking for its time. Two works published in 2003-Thelma Foote's Black and White Manhattan and Leslie Harris's In the Shadow of Slavery-provide more scholarly insights into the contradiction of the pluralistic Dutch as slave holders and traders. Shorto's book, a good read that links some characteristics of Dutch New York to today's bustling city of finance, is well worth the time of the general history enthusiast and is most appropriate for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/03.]-Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The all-but-forgotten origins of Manhattan, told with humor and an acute eye for primary sources. It's good to remember, the author suggests, that the early 17th century was the age of Shakespeare, Descartes, Vermeer, and Bacon, a time of change and tumult. Not the least part of that tumult was Dutch political and legal progressivism, "their matter-of-fact acceptance of foreignness, of religious differences, of odd sorts." Tolerance, in a word, though Shorto (Saints and Madmen, 1999, etc.) is quick to point out that that meant "putting up with" rather than celebrating diversity. By the time New Amsterdam had been established, more as a business settlement of the West India Company than as a colony, its babel of nationalities were seeking balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression. "Pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, and business sharks held sway," he notes. "It was Manhattan . . . right from the start." Despite the tyrannical leanings of the colony's early directors, from Willem Kieft to Peter Stuyvesant, the crucial element that set New Amsterdam apart from its neighbors north and south was its striving toward democracy, largely in the person of Adriaen van der Donck, student of Rene Descartes and of Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, of natural law and human reason. Van der Donck was a veritable Founding Father, the author asserts, though admitting that his authorship of many of the documents illustrating the push toward relative democracy in the colony can only be inferred. "Who was there, how they got along, how they mixed-that is the colony's unheralded legacy," writes Shorto. A struggle played out among military and diplomatic maneuverings and the revamping of the colony'spolitical structure. It was a legacy lived by the gallimaufry of Manhattanites, and it was written by Grotius as much as by John Locke. A bright social history of New Amsterdam that gives the Dutch their due as the first facilitators of its fabled diversity. Agent: Anne Edelstein/Anne Edelstein Agency

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Prologue: The Missing Floor	1
Pt. I	"A Certain Island Named Manathans"
1	The Measure of Things	15
2	The Pollinator	25
3	The Island	37
4	The King, the Surgeon, the Turk, and the Whore	67
Pt. II	Clash of Wills
5	The Lawman	93
6	The Council of Blood	110
7	The Cause	129
8	The One-Legged Man	146
9	The General and the Princess	167
10	The People's Champion	191
11	An American in Europe	209
12	A Dangerous Man	233
Pt. III	The Inheritance
13	Booming	257
14	New York	284
15	Inherited Features	301
	Epilogue: The Paper Trail	319
	Notes	326
	Bibliography	352
	Index	373