Daniel Denton’s A Brief Description of New-York: A Pre-Industrial American Dream

Daniel Denton’s eyewitness account of the Duke of York’s proprietary colony was the first such description of New York by an Englishman. Allegedly a new contribution to his countrymen’s knowledge of America, it was also a candid appeal to immigrate to New York by a public official of Jamaica, New York, only a few years after the colony was forcibly taken from the Dutch. As an early English advertisement for America, Denton’s tract was an ostensibly factual presentation of the advantages to immigrants of settling in New York.

___

  • Denton, Daniel. A Brief Description of New-York: Formerly Called New-Netherlands With the Places Thereunto Adjoyning. London: 1670. Website address www.dentongenealogy.org/dispatch(2).htm/file:^Port-7/Belgelerim/2.htm
  • The Denton Dispatch: A Newsletter for Dentons and Related Families. Vol. 2, No. 2, April, 1986. Website address www.dentongenealogy.org/dispatch(2).htm
  • Faragher, John Mack. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
  • Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia (1781-1782). Website address: http:/etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html.
  • Klein, Milton M. “Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York.” New York History XL (1959): 221-246.
  • Norton, Mary Beth et. al. A People and a Nation: A History of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.
  • Potter, David. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
  • Savelle, Max and Fisher, Mary Anne. The Origins of American Diplomacy: The International History of Angloamerica, 1492-1776. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
  • Seely, Hart (ed,). Pieces of Intelligence: The Existential Poetry of Donald H. Rumsfeld. New York: Free Press, 2003.
  • Snell, Ronald K. “Friendship, Officeholding and the Town Franchise in SeventeenthCentury Springfield, Massachusetts.” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 133 (July 1979): 163-179.