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X-WR-CALNAME:Was Anthony the Turk Really a Turk? “Islam” in Dutch New Y
 ork
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20260714T063459Z
UID:tag:localist.com\,2008:EventInstance_48808005934586
DTSTART:20250424T203000Z
DTEND:20250424T213000Z
DESCRIPTION:Talk by Alan Mikhail (Chace Family Professor of History\, Yale 
 University)\n\n \n\nAt the turn of the seventeenth century\, a Dutch priva
 teer is captured by Muslim pirates and taken to Morocco. To win his freedo
 m\, he converts to Islam and begins plying the waters off the Atlantic coa
 st for prizes and booty. He marries a Muslim woman\, and they have a son t
 hey name Anthony. Anthony enters the family business\, raiding ships trave
 ling in and out of the Mediterranean. He ends up in Amsterdam after one of
  his adventures and there marries a German barmaid and sometimes sex worke
 r named Grietje. They travel to New Netherland\, a recent Dutch acquisitio
 n\, a place that in a few decades will be known as New York. This is the s
 tandard—and seductive—story of New Netherland’s purported single Mus
 lim resident\, Anthony the Turk\, as he is usually known. As with so many 
 good stories\, this one is more myth than fact. This talk traces the life 
 of Anthony—as best we can know it—from the Mediterranean to Amsterdam 
 and then New Netherland to question many of the accepted tenets of his bio
 graphy. In so doing\, it points to the place of Islam in the early modern 
 world and interrogates several conventional narratives about colonial Amer
 ica and the Atlantic world.\n\n \n\nAlan Mikhail is the author of five boo
 ks and editor of another. His work has helped to establish the field of Mi
 ddle East environmental history\, positioned the Ottoman Empire at the cen
 ter of global early modern history\, and creatively scrutinized the place 
 of the archive in the making of past and present. He is currently working 
 on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America. His most recen
 t book\, My Egypt Archive\, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnograph
 ic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. His previous book G
 od’s Shadow: Sultan Selim\, His Ottoman Empire\, and the Making of the M
 odern World won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publi
 sher Book Awards\, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award\, was lon
 glisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence\, and was named a boo
 k of the year by the Times Literary Supplement\, History Today\, Publisher
 s Weekly\, and Glamour. Before that\, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Em
 pire\, Egypt\, and Environmental History received the Ottoman and Turkish 
 Studies Association Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic
  Title. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History won t
 he Roger Owen Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association. Both it a
 nd The Animal in Ottoman Egypt won Yale’s Gustav Ranis International Boo
 k Prize. Mikhail’s articles in the American Historical Review\, Environm
 ental History\, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies recei
 ved prizes as well. He has written for the New York Times\, Washington Pos
 t\, Wall Street Journal\, Los Angeles Times\, Literary Hub\, and Time.
GEO:42.447296;-76.482254
LOCATION:Uris Hall\, G08
SUMMARY:Was Anthony the Turk Really a Turk? “Islam” in Dutch New York
URL;VALUE=URI:https://events.cornell.edu/event/was-anthony-the-turk-really-
 a-turk-islam-in-dutch-new-york
CATEGORIES:Lecture
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