New Netherlander culture is certainly gonna diverge from the Netherlands proper, and early German settlement would certainly play a role there. I think it's fair to say that influence from indigenous groups (Mahican and Iroquois, especially Mohawk, in particular) is also gonna be a big part of that in the rural, northern parts of the state. In the heavily urbanized region to the south, the culture will be heavily influenced by many different immigrant groups, some of which we've already determined (Caribbean, Acadian, Louisiannais, Black English and Indigenous neighbourhoods are all in the mix), and others which we still need to consider.
Affiliated States of Boreoamerica thread
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New Netherlander culture is certainly gonna diverge from the Netherlands proper, and early German settlement would certainly play a role there. I think it's fair to say that influence from indigenous groups (Mahican and Iroquois, especially Mohawk, in particular) is also gonna be a big part of that in the rural, northern parts of the state. In the heavily urbanized region to the south, the culture will be heavily influenced by many different immigrant groups, some of which we've already determined (Caribbean, Acadian, Louisiannais, Black English and Indigenous neighbourhoods are all in the mix), and others which we still need to consider.
I would love to see some good examples of New Netherlander culture, like non-holiday traditions, festivals, dancing, and songs.
The center of New Netherlands could be what's closest to rural old Netherlands and nearby rural Germany.
What role does religion play here? I could see New Netherlands ending up with the same divide the modern Netherlands have, with very tolerant cities and a sort of bible belt in rural areas.
Does New Netherlands discriminate against catholics at first, like the Netherlands proper? I imagine they focus on protestant Germans when trying to pull in immigrants so they'd stay Protestant dominated for a while but evolve a mix of Calvinist and Lutheran churches, but the later waves of immigrants are likely to be catholic.
This seems like a pretty plausible outcome to me!
So, from what I've gathered New Netherland was established with the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church as its official religion, and public Catholic worship was forbidden. However, with New Amsterdam being a very diverse port from the very start, governors tended to be pragmatic and allow unofficial worship to go ahead. I could perhaps see a situation where anti-Catholic laws fall into disuse by the end of the 18th century, and are officially abolished sometime around 1780 or so, if that sounds plausible to all? This could be part of a general statute allowing for religious freedom to Jews, Quakers, Methodists, etc who are also present in the colony. Later on, we should also consider that OTL upstate New York was a centre of religious ferment in the early 19th century, giving rise to Mormonism, Millerism (which later gave us Seventh-Day Adventism and the Jehovah's Witnesses), Spiritualism, the Shakers, the Oneida Society, and the Social Gospel. That's a neat bit of local history and colour I'd like to see maintained in some fashion here.
OTL New Netherland had an official religion but was known for its tolerance - it's been plausibly argued that NN was the birthplace of American pluralism. Director Stuyvesant was very devout and tried at points to enforce the official faith, to go against the tide of toleration. In TTL either Stuyvesant never served, or else he was sidelined at the end of the 1640s by Van der Donck's transformative Directorate, when the colony's institutions were remade along the lines of a Dutch province. I imagine this would include an echo of the religious toleration that the Netherlands was famous for. Catholics might have still faced more discrimination than other religious groups, though.
Those movements specifically very much come out of the English evangelical tradition and grew among the upstate Yankee population. So to some extent they would have analogues in Vermont and northern New Hampshire. I've had TTL's Mormons originate in Vermont, for example. For NN, a different religious mixture could still produce unusual movements. Unique forms of Pietism could find fruitful ground there.
Uh... The Netherlands discriminated against Catholics for a long time, at least politically. I don't think it was known for its religious tolerance until much later.
Yes, it was a haven for people who were persecuted elsewhere. Jews, Anabaptists, and so forth. Toleration wasn't the same as religious freedom in the modern sense, but it was the seventeenth century and it was one of the most tolerant societies around.
Unless you were catholic, for obvious historical reasons. This means Lutheran Germans will have no trouble integrating, and you could see French protestants in the mix too, though they may have their own destinations.
I really like it! The presence of so many weird, semi-disjointed confederations and unions ITTL is really cool and I like it a lot!
Well that's an area needing development, if you feel inspired by the culture or politics of any of the states.
This reminds me, how is Judaism doing in the ASB timeline? I think this is a prime scenario for a Jewish state to exist somewhere in the Americas.
That's entirely dependent on conditions in Europe, which haven't been developed much.
Historically, the Dutch colonies attracted Jews due to their tradition of tolerance; the Puritan colonists strongly discouraged Jewish immigration, and English lands in general only became open to Jewish settlement after Cromwell. New France had few Jews (officially, they were not allowed to travel to the colonies at all), and the Spanish colonies were likewise sparse, though Santo Domingo had a decent sized congregation.
Even after restrictions were lifted on Jewish trade and travel, New England was not friendly to them; New Hampshire had legal restrictions on Jews as late as the 1870s.
Jews were relatively welcome in the American South; Savannah, from the beginning had a large Jewish congregation, although many of them fled to Charleston after the Spanish took the city in 1740. Charleston had the highest Jewish population in North America until 1830.
After progroms intensified and legal restrictions tightened in Germany following the Napoleonic Wars, German Jews emigrated en masse. They preferred New York, which already had a large Jewish population, as well as Philadelphia, which had an established German population.
After Bismarck came to power in 1871, German Jews were granted more rights, and they stopped emigrating in such high numbers. From the 1880s to the 1920s, progroms in Russia and Eastern Europe led to that group fleeing to the U.S. This wave of immigration would become the largest. Communities in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago would be built largely by this generation.
In the 20th century, the mobility of more affluent Jewish families would lead to the growth of communities in Los Angeles and Miami.
With French culture being so much more prevalent in the ASB, I expect Jews would be even more concentrated in New Netherland than in OTL, with other communities in Lower Virginia, Carolina, And to a much lesser extent in Rhode Island and East Dominica.
If progroms develop in Russia in the 1880s in TTL as well, I imagine that Protestant Swedish elites would be able to arrange for mass emigration across the Atlantic, particularly to Christiana. There might then be a mass movement of affluent ASB Jews to Havana and Santo Domingo, mirroring the movement to warmer climates in the late 20th century.
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I don't know if it necessarily holds that French-speaking parts of the ASB would continue to be inhospitable to Jews: i would imagine that the Bonapartist-era Kingdom would bring over Napoleonic codes of tolerance. Big cities like Montreal, Chicagou and Detroit would probably still have considerable Jewish populations. (Montreal's 20th century cultural history is kind of inseparable from its Jewish community- Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, smoked meat, Montreal-style bagels- I'd hate for this to not have some reflection here).
Obviously, attitudes would change by the 20th century, but the fact is that immigrants tend to gather where they can find their own kind of people in a kind of feedback loop; any city that had a history of hostility towards Jews would normally end up behind.
I started working on flags for the states -- at least, the ones with descriptions that I can use as reference for flags. I can't post all of them together, but here's the mega-file that has all of them so far.
(They're all on separate, named, layers and I have the uncompressed versions on standby if you want to look at any of these right now. I'm pretty proud of most of these, truth be told!)
Hey, I've been lurking for years and finally got around to making an account, just wanted to let you know that the ASB has been pretty much my favorite thing on this site for a while now. Also, I was wondering whether a couple Boreoamerica-ish things from OTL US history exist in TTL.
One is the Melungeons. On one hand, they fit the theme of extending the "Middle Ground" in time and space. On the other hand, maybe the relative lack of "miscegenation" taboos would render them unremarkable: just another nameless group of Mixed people in the mountains, rather than an outlier that complicates the binary racial caste system.
The other is the Manilamen of southern Louisiana. IIRC, the TTL colonial history of the Philippines is still up in the air, but it's just such a Boreoamerican-sounding story: Filipino deserters from Spanish galleons in the Caribbean setting up their own little villages in the bayou. It's this weird, little-known piece of local history that connects to broader historical events in unexpected ways.
Again, love the project, keep up the good work.
One is the Melungeons. On one hand, they fit the theme of extending the "Middle Ground" in time and space. On the other hand, maybe the relative lack of "miscegenation" taboos would render them unremarkable: just another nameless group of Mixed people in the mountains, rather than an outlier that complicates the binary racial caste system.
The other is the Manilamen of southern Louisiana. IIRC, the TTL colonial history of the Philippines is still up in the air, but it's just such a Boreoamerican-sounding story: Filipino deserters from Spanish galleons in the Caribbean setting up their own little villages in the bayou. It's this weird, little-known piece of local history that connects to broader historical events in unexpected ways.
Again, love the project, keep up the good work.
I think that's a pretty good argument. That implies that New Amsterdam will also be known for its Jewish community, similar to New York. But of course the vastly different history of Central and Eastern Europe means that it won't be exactly the same as what we know from our timeline.
Impressive collection! Is there a way to show them small but side by side, with names?
I should say that I posted a flag of Russian California, as an inset on the map. So it's very tiny, but I'd prefer to keep something like it rather than something based more directly on the Russian flag. Many former colonies would want to choose a symbol that's not simply colonial. My thinking was that Russian California, having "Russia" right there in the name, would want to choose a more independent-looking flag as a kind of balance. The same might go for the combined Russia-Spain flag, though I'm not sure which state it's for.
I'd also like to move away from the USA-type design that's typified in the OTL San Francisco flag: put all kinds of symbols onto it, then slap the name onto the flag since the assemblage is so confusing. How about something that just uses a phoenix? The earthquakes and fires that made the city have to "rise from the ashes" several times would surely be present in TTL as well - along with a very destructive war in the 1860s. So a phoenix makes sense as a symbol. The same might go for the New Albion flag: there must be something else that could go in the canton than just the name. Maybe something to represent Francis Drake? He used a red wyvern on white as one of his coats of arms, that could look good with the cross.
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Welcome! And thank you very much!
I really thought I had worked some version of the Melungeons into the history of Watauga, but I guess they didn't make it. I wonder if they ended up migrating somewhere else, Ohio would probably have been more welcoming than Watauga was. Or maybe there are populations in both states. But in my head they've been a part of the world, even if I forgot to say something about them.
I hadn't heard of the Manilamen before. With a PoD of 1600, the Spanish Philippines are a fait accompli in this timeline, so it's definitely fair to use them in a storyline. This is a great one. Though I should point out that Louisiana did not pass through any period of Spanish control in TTL; did the Manilamen incident have anything to do with that? Either way, they sound interesting. Where can I learn more about them?