The New Netherland Institute is announcing the 2021 winners of its four grants and awards.

 Hendricks Award 

 Danny L. Noorlander $5000   Heaven’s Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World, published by Cornell University Press in 2019. The committee unanimously agreed that it is a deeply impressive, even-handed, and nuanced treatment of the relationship between faith, worship, and the emerging capitalist economy of the Dutch Republic, as epitomized in the West India Company. It is an important contribution to the scholarship of the Atlantic World and provides essential context for understanding Dutch colonial society in New Netherland.

 Charles W. Wendell Research Grant

 Debra Bruno   $5000    Bruno is a journalist who is researching slavery in the Hudson Valley through research into her own family history as well as documents that shed light on people her ancestors held in slavery.  She titles her project "Slavery's Hidden History."  Bruno has made contact--and forged a friendship--with a descendant of one of the people held in slavery by Bruno's ancestors. 

 Student Scholar in Residence Grant

 Samuel Jennings, a historian of religion, working on his dissertation at Oklahoma State University $ 1000 (reduced grant) for the portion of his dissertation that relates to the Dutch in North America. His dissertation research examines the changing Protestant Atlantic world and the ways various Protestant traditions in North America (including both Dutch and English) thought about Mary, the mother of Jesus, both as a Catholic devotion and within their own traditions.  Jennings’ research is finding interactions, engagements and attitudes that challenge common expectations

 Clague and Carol Van Slyke Article Prize

 Dennis Maika and Susanah Shaw Romney $1000 (shared $500 ea)

 Dennis Maika” “To ‘experiment with a parcel of negros’: Incentive, Collaboration, and Competition in New Amsterdam’s Slave Trade,” Journal of Early American History 10 (2020), 33-69. Dennis Maika makes an important and much-needed contribution to our understanding of the slave trade in this Dutch colonial settlement. Through extensive research and thoughtful analysis, Maika offers an important corrective to the notion that the colony was a slave-trading center and makes an interesting argument about corporate/private collaboration, changing regional conditions, and adaptation. Undoubtedly, Maika’s article will become the main text on the subject for decades to come.

 Susanah Shaw Romney’s article, “Reytory Angola, Seventeenth-Century Manhattan (US),” in Erica L. Ball, Tatiana Seijas, & Terri L. Snyder (eds.), As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas (pp. 58-78), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).  Regardless of the archival limitations, Romney manages to tell the story of Reytory Angola by placing her life within the broader context of slavery in NY. As such, the article presents a powerful and thoughtful overview of one person’s efforts to navigate enslavement in New Netherland and claim her freedom in various ways. In short, this article is a “tour de force.” in New Amsterdam.