About the Author

Russell Shorto has written two previous books: Gospel Truth, about the search for the historical Jesus, and Saints and Madmen, about psychiatry and religion. He writes regularly for The New York Times Magazine, and his work has appeared in many other publications, including GQ and The New Yorker. For this book, he spent three years studying documents and working with scholars in the U.S. and the Netherlands. The hub of his research was the New Netherland Project in Albany. In seeking out vestiges of the colony, he traveled the length of New Netherland, from New York's Mohawk Valley to Delaware Bay. He paced the streets of New Amsterdam, just steps away from the site of the World Trade Center, and sought traces of the colony in the wilds of Brooklyn and the Bronx. In the Netherlands, his research took him from Texel Island in the north, from which Henry Hudson embarked on his New World voyage, to Amsterdam, Leiden, and The Hague. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley with his wife and their two daughters.

(Author photograph © Marnie Henricksson)