Customer Reviews

Before the Melting Pot: Society and Culture in Colonial New York City, 1664-1730

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The title is a clever pun on the Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan work, Beyond the Melting Pot, which is a history of ethnic groups in modern New York. Joyce D. Goodfriend offers an excellent discussion of ethnicity in colonial New York. She examines patterns of officeholding, occupation, intermarriage and church attendance among various ethnic groups over several generations. While Goodfriend discusses the English, her work is stronger in considering the French Huguenots, and strongest in examining the Dutch. Her thoroughness is illuminating and her style entertaining.

This book, however, does not encompass every ethnic group in colonial New York. For instance, the German and the African presence in the city does not receive the same scrutiny as the French and the Dutch. Goodfriend does offer a portrait of ethnic interaction. Her work, however, is primarily a consideration of Dutch (and French) adjustment to English colonial policy.

I found this to be a tough read and somewhat boring. I bought this book due to an interest in this time period and it does give facts about research in this period but is not really a history per say. The lack of material regarding colonial United States was surprising to me. Most history books deal with the initial founding of an area and then jump to the Revolutionary War. If you are looking more for a developing history rather than facts I would recommend Russell Shorto's, Island at the Center of the World, but that only takes you to the beginning of the 18th Century. Finding material from 1700-1770 is are rare unexplored nitch in time. You will find the Anglicanization of the America's interesting and it's clash with the Dutch culture that originally settled this area.