The Ancient House: Constructing Community in the Seventeenth-Century New York Borderlands

While New Amsterdam has captured public imagination and scholarly attention for centuries, the Dutch borderland settlement that became Albany, New York, was no less vital to the development of early America. In The Ancient House, historian Erin Kramer examines how early relationships between the Dutch and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) built a foundation for the town’s oversized role in European and Indigenous diplomacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Albany (called “the ancient house...