06/11/2026
This week, as part of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, the Holland Society visited the Museum of the City of New York to tour The Occupied City, an immersive exhibit highlighting New York's important role during the Revolution. While the tour covered the city's vital contributions to the sparks of rebellion in 1763 and its rise to becoming the nation's capital in 1790, traces of Dutch history can be found throughout the exhibit. Included on display was silver from some of New York's wealthiest families at the time of Dutch descent. The Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, de Peysters, and Philipses were highlighted. The group discussed the tensions these Dutch families, as significant landowners, faced in the Hudson Valley amid the early signs of the Revolution, and how the British takeover of New Amsterdam still left deep-seated discontent that, generations later, helped sway most to support the rebellion.
As the exhibit broadened its scope to showcase the international support for the American revolutionaries, the museum features a Dutch newspaper cartoon from the time when the British Lion was subdued by the Dutch Lion and other national powers. Dutch merchants sent war supplies to their American colleagues, with whom they had decades-long relationships, as early as 1774. Eventually, support for the Americans led the Netherlands to war with Britain, known as the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, which lasted until 1784.
The Holland Society would like to give special thanks to for such an excellent tour and for weaving together, in such an engaging way, the different experiences of revolutionaries and loyalists, enslaved and free Black New Yorkers, women, Native peoples, and others who influenced and were influenced by this tumultuous period.
