September 17, 2026
On September 17th, American historian Alan Mikhail gave a lecture about his new book Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York. Alan Mikhail, the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University, is a widely recognized historian of the early modern Muslim world. Across six books, over thirty scholarly articles, and dozens of essays and reviews, he has helped establish the field of Middle East environmental history, positioned the Ottoman Empire at the center of global early modern history, and written creatively about the place of the archive in making the past and present. In addition to his books, he has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and Time.
In this new book, Newcomers, published in May this year, Alan Mikhail focuses on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America. It is the exceptional tale of an unorthodox, seventeenth–century married couple whose rags-to-riches story fundamentally rewrites our knowledge of American history at its very beginnings. A man thought to be Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid hardly match the image we have of America’s founders, and this book offers revelatory insights into New York’s seventeenth-century origins.
In his lecture, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of American beginnings through the tale of Anthony “the Turk” and Grietje Reyniers. Married in Amsterdam, they arrived in Dutch New Amsterdam in the 1630s, hoping to forge a new life. Always outsiders in the young colony, they battled Dutch authorities, brawled with neighbors, and seized land from Native Americans. In this revisionist portrait of the early American family, we learn of anti-Muslim sentiment through Anthony and of female defiance through Grietje. Eventually banished from Manhattan to Long Island, Anthony and Grietje farmed, prospered, and raised a family whose descendants included the Vanderbilts and President Harding.
Click here to view the recording of the lecture.