A man thought to be a Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid fleeing poverty are hardly the images we have of New York’s founders. This presentation will introduce the seventeenth-century immigrant couple Anthony and Grietje in all their complexity as both outsiders and colonizers. Married in Amsterdam, they crossed the Atlantic to the newly colonized Lenapehoking. Dutch authorities in New Netherland attacked Anthony for being the Muslim he was not, while crude harbor denizens branded Grietje a whore. The rebellious couple was eventually banished to the “frontier,” to what is now Gravesend Brooklyn, where they and their four daughters farmed and seized land from Native Americans while fighting English colonists from the north. Though now mostly forgotten, the rowdy couple’s descendants include some of the most distinguished names in American social and political history, among them the Vanderbilts and President Warren G. Harding. Tracing the lives of Anthony and Grietje tells a new history of the American family and of immigration, and helps us to conceive of the history of early America beyond the dominant categories of Native, Black, and European.

This presentation will take place in-person at the Crispell Memorial French Church located at 60 Huguenot Street.

Alan Mikhail is the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of six books, most recently Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.

$8 General Admission

$5 Discounted Admission (for HHS members, seniors, students, active military personnel and their families, and veterans)

This program is sponsored by RBT CPAs LLP.

Historic Huguenot Street’s programs are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.