Ruling the waves

By GREG COOK | June 23, 2009

Anti-Dutch propaganda from this fighting remains with us today in the phrases "Dutch courage" and "Dutch treat." But the legacy of the Dutch Golden Age is deeply rooted in the present United States. The 1581 Dutch Act of Abjuration, which announced the split from Spain, was a model for our Declaration of Independence. As the republic threw off outside control and religious oppression, it offered relative tolerance to groups like the Puritans, who went on to help found New England. America's wide-open, on-the-make capitalism is a descendant of the Dutch trading empire, which prized thrift, industriousness, business savvy, and the bottom line while welcoming anyone with something to sell. These guiding principles were seeded here by the Dutch trading settlement of New Netherland. Its capital, New Amsterdam, took in such Dutch-named areas as Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx. Today, of course, we know it by the name it acquired after the British seized it from the Dutch in 1664: New York.

Read Greg's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.

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ARTICLES BY GREG COOK

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MERRY PRANKSTERS | May 07, 2013
Parked out front of Brown University's gray modernist Granoff Center on a recent sunny morning were one of those 15-foot-tall inflatable rats that unions install in front of businesses they're protesting and a limousine sloppily painted to resemble a yellow and black school bus.

ALTERED IMAGES | April 30, 2013
Among the handsome Washington Street storefronts of AS220's renovated Mercantile Block building, with their neo-old-timey signs, is the residents' entrance to the building. It is against AS220's religion to leave any space empty that can be filled with art. So the lobby is the AS220 Resident Gallery, which occupants of the building take turns filling with their stuff.

IN THE CITY | April 23, 2013
One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Providence art scene is how the city itself has been such a rich subject. A decade ago, the city became a galvanizing topic as artists fought to protect the old mills that served as their homes and studios from demolition — with mixed success. But lately, the community's industrial architecture itself has attracted artists' attention.