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was our crucial pillar and counsellor during many critical moments. The late Jerry Kaplan understood immediately what we wanted to do and opened the first of what would be many doors. Andre Schiffrin and Peter Dimock provided wise tactical and strategic advice. David Klein, Robert Youdelman, Leon Friedman, Bardyl Tirana, and Kellis Parker helped steer us through some legal rapids. Eddie Ellis offered the fruits of his encyclopedic labor and much of his library. Marty Duberman pointed us to Frances, and Sydelle Kramer, Frances’s associate, pointed out a productive path at a fork in the road. We thank too those in the publishing world who had faith in us at an earlier stage—Jim Silberman, Dominick Anfuso, Michael Denneny, Aaron Asher, Philip Pochoda, Arthur Samuelson—and we thank those who didn’t, for spurring us to greater effort.

All praise to Laura Brown, publisher at Oxford University Press, for having the courage and enthusiasm to tackle such a massive project and for doing so with such gusto and expertise. Sheldon Meyer, a richly experienced editor of the old school (long may it prosper), helped us slim down our manuscript from preposterous to merely gargantuan proportions. The artistry and commitment of India Cooper added luster to the copyediting profession. Susan Day, Brandon Trissler, Adam Bohannon, Pat Burns, Joellyn Ausanka, Mary Ellen Curley, and Russell Perreault formed the team that took Gotham from hard drive to hard copy.

Both of us work in a great if currently beleaguered institution, the City University of New York, and we would like to thank our respective colleges and colleagues for their many years of support.

At Brooklyn College, EGB has had the good fortune to share an office with an old friend, Don Gerardi, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s religious history proved indispensable on more than one occasion. Teo Ruiz and Tim Gura, eminent teachers as well as deep-dyed New Yorkers, have been generous and loyal comrades, off campus and on. During his year as a visiting professor at Brooklyn, Peter Charles Hoffer read the first half of the manuscript with uncommon diligence and kept reminding me to let go of it. As a graduate student, Sara Gronim untangled some puzzling aspects of Kieft’s war; as a new colleague, she has willingly shared her work on Jane Colden and the study of science in eighteenth-century New York. Thanks, too, to Christoph Kimmich, former chairman of the History Department, Provost of the College, and now interim Chancellor of the University, who has been a sturdy advocate of this and other scholarly projects. A tip of the hat, finally, to the many hundreds of students who have joined me over the years in History 44 (“Burrows on the Boroughs,” as one of them called it): your boundless curiosity about the city’s past and your steadfast belief in its future should be an example to us all.

I must also pay my respects to a small coterie of Gothamites who, though not at Brooklyn College, vetted great blocs of manuscript and responded with such good grace to my appeals for additional assistance that they might as well have occupied offices just down the hall: Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Project in Albany; Milton Klein, prolific doyen of early New York historians; Howard Rock, who also freely shared his collection of New York pictures; and David Voorhees, editor of de Halve Maen and the Jacob Leisler Papers.

At MW’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, President Gerald Lynch has been a staunch backer of this enterprise and over the years has put the resources of the College behind it. Former Vice President John Collins was long a beamish supporter. In recent years Provost Basil Wilson, an ardent sponsor of intellectual enterprise at the College, arranged crucial time off for writing. My heartfelt thanks to them and to former Dean John Cammett and once-and-future Chairman Isidore Silver (for bringing me to Jay a quarter century ago) and to colleagues past and present who buoyed me up over the long years of Gothamizing: Bob Banowicz, Paul Brenner, Blanche Wiesen Cook,