In 1664, England decided to invade the Dutch-controlled city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. Charles II and his brother, the Duke of York, had dreams of empire, and their archrivals, the Dutch, were in the way. But Richard Nicolls, the military officer who led the English flotilla bent on destruction, changed his strategy once he encountered Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s canny director general. TAKING MANHATTAN reveals the founding of New York to be an invention, the result of creative negotiations that would blend the multiethnic, capitalistic society of New Amsterdam with the power of the rising English empire. But the birth of what might be termed the first modern city is also a story of the brutal dispossession of Native Americans and of the roots of American slavery.

SMALLTIME is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, Russell Shorto’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life --- and wife --- in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. The book draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family. But SMALLTIME is something more. The author enlists his ailing father --- Tony, the mobster’s son --- as his partner in the search for their troubled patriarch.

Russell Shorto takes us back to the founding of the American nation, drawing on diaries, letters and autobiographies to flesh out six lives that cast the era in a fresh new light. They include an African man who freed himself and his family from slavery, a rebellious young woman who abandoned her abusive husband to chart her own course, and a certain Mr. Washington, who was admired for his social graces but harshly criticized for his often-disastrous military strategy. Through these lives, we understand that the revolution was fought over the meaning of individual freedom, a philosophical idea that became a force for violent change.

Tourists know Amsterdam as a picturesque city of low-slung brick houses; student travelers know it for hash bars; art lovers know it for Rembrandt's glorious portraits. Amsterdam is the font of liberalism, in both its senses. Tolerance for free thinking and free love make it a place where, in the words of one of its mayors, "craziness is a value." Russell Shorto reveals how the idiosyncratic evolution of Amsterdam has had a profound effect on Dutch --- and world --- history.