Friday, October 06, 2006

History 101 with Dr. Papa Bear

Das Oath's Dr. Papa Bear gave me a little lesson on the influence of The Netherlands on parts of the US' east coast. you better recognise, here we go!

-The Dutch settlers of Nieuw Amsterdam were called Yankees by the English, because the most common Dutch male names at the time were Jan & Kees.
-When New Yorkers are talking about the stoop in front of there house, they are actually talking about their 'stoep', which is a sidewalk
-brooklyn = breukelen
-flushing = vlissingen
-staten island, named after the 'staten generaal', our old form of government or something
-the bronx, named after the farm of Paul Bronk, a Dutch immigrant
-Before New York was New York it was New Amsterdam, and a Dutch pirate named Blauveldt lived there. NJ has a town named after him.
-In NJ you can find a bunch of other towns with Dutch names like Hoboken and Orangeburg
-Near Alabany there's a ton of towns with Dutch names such as Kinderhook, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Renselaer, Watervliet.
-Speaking of OKinderhook, in the days of old the apples that were grown there were called Old-Kinderhook apples and shipped of in crates stating O.K. apples, thus coining the term O.K.
-Martin van Buren, a US president who had Dutch as his first language was born in Kinderhook and was nicknamed Old-Kinderhook, so his campaign had the catchphrase Vote O.K.!
-Furthermore in Booklyn and the Bronx you can find a lot of streetnames like Ten Eijck, Havemeijer en Boerum, which are Dutch names.

-Tales like Rip van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow all take place in Dutch immigrants settlements.
-Hudson discovered the Hudson river, coincidence? I think not.
-The Bowery is named after Peter Stuijvesant's farm named De Bouwerij.
-Harlem is Haarlem

Thank you Dr. Papa Bear!

4 comments:

xroldx said...

we should never have traded New Amsterdam for that godforsaken Suriname

xroldx said...

We never should have traded New York (Nieuw Amsterdam) for Suriname.

iamjoy said...

hahaha inderdaad

Anonymous said...

ik hou van de geschiedenislessen van de beer. Vooral zijn specialismen: NYC algemeen, Nederlandse kolonisten op de east-coast en natuurlijk Hitler en zijn nazi vrindjes.