Some people travel with a particular objective in mind: to find the past in the present. It’s an impossibility, of course — you never truly succeed, because the present is so very present. But in a wayward, fast-moving world, a focus on history can root you, and offer perspective. This was my idea on a recent trip when I set out to find New York’s origins.

In the early 1600s, the Dutch founded a colony called New Netherland, with its capital of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. It was the base from which they laid a claim to the New World, and from which they tussled with their archenemy, England, and her colonies in New England and Virginia. The English won the power struggle when they took over in 1664, rechristening New Amsterdam as New York City.

New Netherland may be history, but its legacy is hiding in plain sight. It can be found in old houses and barns, in street patterns and in New York place names, from Harlem to Rotterdam, from “Breuckelen” (now Brooklyn) to Rensselaer. It’s in American culture broadly: “cookies” are Dutch; so is coleslaw. These small-scale legacies mask larger inheritances. The Dutch of the 17th century pioneered the concepts of free trade and religious tolerance, key ingredients in the development of what was to come: New York itself.