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From New Amsterdam to New York Essay

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New York City is commonly recognized as the genesis of cultural trends and one of the initial American cities to cope with increasing social diversity. The Museum of the City of New York’s “Activist New York” exhibition recounts New York City immigrants’ fight for religious freedom from colonial times to the present. Above all, as the United States of America has established and amended a set of national principles, New York City has been the focal point of dissension of religious rights. From the religious suppressions of Dutch Director-General Peter Stuyvesant to the mid-19th century clashes between Protestants and Catholics over the direction of the city’s public education system, to recent times when Muslims found themselves amid …show more content…

Stuyvesant feared the Quakers were deteriorating the moral fabric of his colony and ordered Quakers to be expelled from the colony and fined any colonist who welcomed them into their homes. Furthermore, in the 1650’s, Stuyvesant tried to keep all religious minorities out of the colony altogether (Museum of New York). In spite of constant oppression, in 1657, thirty-one colonists from the area now known as Flushing, Queens, put in writing a document that came to be considered an early forerunner to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution. The Flushing Remonstrance was a formal document protesting the ban on worship of Quakers as well as Presbyterians, Independents and Baptists (Harrington 104). Dismissing the Remonstrance as a “seditious, mutinous and detestable letter of defiance,” Stuyvesant ordered the arrest of the Flushing’s officials (Burrows 61). Five years after the dispatching of the Flushing Remonstrance, Stuyvesant arrested an English Quaker named John Bowne for conducting Quaker observances at his residence. Bowne was eventually expelled from the colony. In time, Bowne managed to appear in front of the Dutch West India Company in Holland. In a reversal of fortune, the Dutch West India Company upheld Bowne’s plea and ordered Stuyvesant to cease all religious persecution and to allow full religious freedom to all settlers in the colony (Lonborg). Finally, after fifteen years of authoritarian rule under

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