“As anyone familiar with the history of New Paltz knows, its ethnic history is beyond complicated, as it was founded by French-speaking Protestant Walloons from the Spanish Netherlands, who established their town in a Dutch cultural region in an English colony. I began my relationship with that history in 2001, and for the next decade, I endeavored to unravel and explain that complexity, urged on by the research of many others. What I discovered is that for nearly a century and a half, the founders of New Paltz and their 18th-century descendants freely amalgamated those ethnic cultures on their own terms and in their own ways from the very beginning of their community. In that time, never was their community precisely Walloon, Dutch or English but a complicated intermingling of the three.”
Dr. Kenneth Shefsiek holds a Master's in Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University and a Ph.D. in Early American History from the University of Georgia. He is the author of Set in Stone: Creating and Commemorating a Hudson Valley Culture, which received the 2017 Hendricks Award from the New Netherland Institute. Ken is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he teaches public history and early American history, and where he served as the director of the graduate program in public history from 2015-2022. Ken is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled "A God of Order: Negotiating Authority in the Dutch Reformed Church in Colonial America." Articles related to that work have recently been published in De Halve Maen, New York History, The Journal of Presbyterian History, and The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Ken served as the curator of education at Historic Huguenot Street from 2001-2003 and as executive director of the Geneva (NY) Historical Society from 2006-2012.
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