Alan Mikhail´s Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York

Anthony Janszoon van Salee and his wife Geitje were always feuding with neighbors and authorities, who put them down as the Turk and a whore and who kept putting them on trial before they were finally exiled from Manhattan — only to become the biggest landowners in what’s now Brooklyn, with descendants who married into American royalty. Alan Mikhail, the author of Newcomers: The Story of Anthony and Grietje and the Founding of New York, joins Harry Siegel and guest host Asad Dandia — the new Brooklyn historian and an informal Mamdani advisor who gives a walking tour or Lower Manhattan’s old Little Syria that includes a capsule history of van Salee — for a lively conversation about the contested story of a man who came to be known, a century after his death, as the city”s first free Muslim.