Russell Shorto Quote
Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.
Russell Shorto
Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.
Related Quotes
About Russell Shorto
In November 2017, he published Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom, which tells the story of the American Revolution through the eyes of six Americans from vastly different walks of life. His 2021 memoir Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob covers Shorto's own family history and his ancestors involvement in the American Mafia in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His most recent work published in 2025, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America, continues to explore New York history into the British colonial period starting in 1664.
In 2022, Shorto founded the New Amsterdam Project at the New-York Historical Society, with a mission to promote awareness of New York's Dutch origins.