10/12/2026
Greetings from the Bay Ridge Historical Society. We hope you can join us this Wednesday, October 21 at 7:30 p.m. via Zoom for our second meeting of the Fall 2026 Season..
This month we are pleased to have Alan Mikhail, a professor of history at Yale, join us to discuss his latest book, "Newcomers" that tells the story of Anthony and Grietje, immigrants to New Amsterdam in the 1630s with unusual backgrounds—he may have been a once-enslaved Moroccan pirate, she may have been a German s*x worker. In the future New York City. They endured intense bigotry, battled Dutch authorities and brawled with their neighbors: The swarthy Anthony, sometimes called Anthony the Turk, was attacked for being a Muslim (he was not), while Grietje became the model of an independent colonial American woman, defiantly mooning her critics rather than accept their derision. They were exiled to what’s now Brooklyn, among the first nonnatives to settle there, establishing a farm in present-day Bath Beach and thriving as they battled Native Americans and found legitimacy as a Dutch bulwark against the English settlement at Gravesend. The stories of Anthony and Grietje, as much as they can be put together from surviving archival traces, challenge our assumptions about the earliest American colonists and the Dutch in New York while expanding our understanding of anti-Muslim bigotry before the Revolution.
We have interesting speakers scheduled for our November and December meetings with historian Patricia M. Salmon joining us in November to discuss the effects that the opening of the Verrazano Bridge, and a lack of urban planning for it, had on Staten Island and Brooklyn and Professor Keith Muchowski joining us in December to tell the story of Nathaniel Woodhull, who led New York forces during the Revolutionary War and died in present-day Bensonhurst from wounds incurred during the Battle of Brooklyn.
As in the past, our meetings will take place exclusively over Zoom. Below is outlined registration information. Attendance is free and open to the public so please feel free to invite your friends and associates but advance registration is required so please click the link below and register! If clicking does not work, please copy the link into your browser.
You are invited to register for a Zoom webinar!
When: Oct 21, 2026 07:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Bay Ridge Historical October 21, 2026 Meeting
Register in advance for this webinar:
Greetings from the Bay Ridge Historical Society. This month we are pleased to have Alan Mikhail, a professor of history at Yale, join us to discuss his latest book, "Newcomers" that tells the story of Anthony and Grietje, immigrants to New Amsterdam in the 1630s with unusual backgrounds—he may hav...
