Red/White Quilt of Historical RedWork Embroidery - Peter Stuyvesant

Red/White Quilt of Historical RedWork Embroidery

Peter Stuyvesant

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Peter Stuyvesant

Peter Stuyvesant (English pronunciation (/ˈstaɪvəsənt/); in Dutch also Pieter and Petrus Stuyvesant); (1611 or 1612) served as the last Dutch director-general of the colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded provisionally to the English in 1664, after which it was renamed New York. He was a major figure in the early history of New York City and his name has been given to various landmarks and points of interest throughout the city (e.g. Stuyvesant High School, Stuyvesant Town, Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood, etc.).

Stuyvesant's accomplishments as director-general included a great expansion for the settlement of New Amsterdam beyond the southern tip of Manhattan. Among the projects built by Stuyvesant's administration were the protective wall on Wall Street, the canal that became Broad Street, and Broadway. Stuyvesant, himself a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, opposed religious pluralism and came into conflict with Lutherans, Jews, Roman Catholics and Quakers as they attempted to build places of worship in the city and practice their faiths. However, Stuyvesant particularly supported Antisemitism, and loathed Jews not merely through religion, but also through race.

At the age of 20,^[2] Stuyvesant went to the University of Franeker, where he studied languages and philosophy,^[3] but several years later he was expelled from the school after he seduced the daughter of his landlord.^[4] He was then sent to Amsterdam by his father, where Stuyvesant – now using the Latinized version of his first name, "Petrus", to indicate that he had university schooling – joined the Dutch West India Company. In 1630, the company assigned him to be their commercial agent on a small island just off of Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, and then five years later transferred him to the nearby Brazilian state of Pernambuco. In 1638, he was moved again, this time to the colony of Curaçao, the main Dutch naval base in the West Indies, where, just four years later, at barely 30 years old, he became the acting governor of that colony, as well as Aruba and Bonaire,^[2] a position he held until 1644.

In April 1644, he coordinated and led an attack on the island of Saint Martin – which the Spanish had taken from the Dutch, and had almost been recaptured by them in 1625 – with an armada of 12 ships carrying more than a thousand men. He invested the island when the Spanish would not surrender, but was not successful in preventing them from getting supplies from Puerto Rico. A cannonball crushed Stuyvesant's right leg, and it was amputated just below the knee. Still in severe pain, he called off the siege a month later.^[5]

Stuyvesant returned to the Netherlands for convalescence, where his right leg was replaced with a wooden peg. Stuyvesant was given the nicknames "Peg Leg Pete" and "Old Silver Nails" because he used a wooden stick studded with silver nails as a prosthesis.^[6] The West India Company saw the loss of Stuyvesant's leg as a "Roman" sacrifice, while Stuyvesant himself saw the fact that he did not die from his injury as a sign that God was saving him to do great things.^[5] A year later, in May 1645, he was selected by the Company to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of the New Netherland colony, including New Amsterdam, the site of present-day New York City.

This information can be found at www.wikipedia.org

Apparently Peter Stuyvesant is also a cigarette brand ...

Peter Stuyvesant is a brand of cigarettes currently owned by British American Tobacco and manufactured by the American Cigarette Company. In Australia and New Zealand, the brand is manufactured by Imperial Tobacco. The cigarette brand is named after Petrus Stuyvesant, Governor of New Amsterdam, later New York City.

This information can also be found at www.wikipedia.org