New Amsterdam Plein: Four

In 1626, Peter Minuit acquired Manhattan Island from a group of Indians for sixty guilders worth of goods, later calculated by a nineteenth century historian as twenty-four dollars. Of the thousands of transactions in which native Americans sold parcels to Europeans, this one became legendary because of its seemingly absurd price and as a dramatic illustration of the long process of stripping natives of their land. In fact, the Manhattan Indians had no concept of permanent property transfer and understood the agreement more as a treaty of cooperation: the Dutch would be allowed to use the land, but the Indians would remain as well, and they did throughout the life of the colony. For them, the so-called purchase price was a token of alliance, which Minuet would have understood.

New York, New York · United States