Unless, of course, you're Russell Shorto. In 1997, the best-selling author of The Island at the Center of the World brought his young daughter to play in the churchyard of St. Mark's-in-the-Bowery, near their apartment. As she ran around under the sycamores, he studied the worn 17th-century tombstones, including that of Peter Stuyvesant, the notorious peg-legged Dutchman who lost Manhattan to the English. Shorto found himself wondering what sort of settlement he had once governed, and how this quintessentially urban neighborhood had looked without pavement.

The Island at the Center of the World (a title that has provoked some affront in outer-borough booksignings) conjures an untamed island of reedy salt marshes, waterfalls, and forested hills, populated by deer, mountain lions, and wolves. But no one Shorto asked, including historians, seemed to know much about Stuyvesant's colony. Then he met Albany scholar Charles Gehring, who's devoted the past 30 years to translating a 12,000-page archive of handwritten 17th-century documents from the New Netherland colony. Initially planning a magazine feature, Shorto kept asking questions that started, "Do you mean to tell me...?" As he listened to Gehring, he realized that his whole notion of America's roots was shifting. "Everyone knows about the Puritans in New England, the Virginia colony," he says, "Well, what was in between?"

A lot, it would seem. Shorto describes the first European settlement on the Hudson: "It was founded by the Dutch, who called it New Netherland, but half of its residents were from elsewhere. Its capital was a tiny collection of rough buildings perched on the edge of a limitless wilderness, but its muddy lanes and waterfront were prowled by a Babel of peoples–Norwegians, Germans, Italians, Jews, Africans (slaves and free), Walloons, Bohemians, Munsees, Montauks, Mohawks, and many others—all living on the rim of empire, struggling to find a way of being together, searching for a balance between chaos and order, liberty and oppression. Pirates, prostitutes, smugglers, and business sharks held sway in it. It was Manhattan, in other words, right from the start."

A thriving multicultural community on American soil in the pre-colonial era? Why haven't we heard about this? (Though every American schoolchild can recite the shopworn anecdote of the purchase of Manhattan Island from the Indians for $24, the Dutch colony is a mere footnote to the "original" 13 English colonies.)

"It's the history we choose to remember versus the history we choose not to," says Shorto. "The Puritans made for a stronger creation myth." He is quick to point out that the English refugees who, we've been taught, came to America for religious freedom, would shortly wind up burning witches.

The New Netherland colony was far more freewheeling: a messy, contentious port where currency ranged from doubloons to beaver pelts and the salty residents spoke 18 languages. In Holland, tolerance was not some lofty ideal, but a practical response to an international sea trade and different peoples living side by side in close quarters. One has only to look at portraiture of the era—foppish English nobles in brocades and periwigs versus Rembrandt's sturdy merchants in dark, simple garb—to realize that these were different cultures indeed.

New Netherland stretched from Manhattan to the upriver fur-trading settlement at Fort Orange, later known as Beverwyck, then Albany. There was little but forest between these two settlements in the Dutch period, though Wiltwyck (later Kingston) became an important outpost, where deeper-keeled tall ships were exchanged for boats that could navigate the shallower waters to the north. The Mid-Hudson Valley saw many Dutch settlers later ("when the English took over, the Dutch didn't go anywhere") and hundreds of Dutch names remain on the land.

The Island at the Center of the World has popped up on best-seller lists around the country ("mostly in blue states," Shorto observes wryly). The author worked hard at shaping his tale for all readers. "History is just this mass of stuff," he says, alluding to Gehring's 12,000-page pile of moldering land grants, court records, and shipping lists. "I struggled the whole time: Is it history or is it a story?" Those who yearn for scholarly documentation can take comfort in Shorto's 45 pages of notes and bibliography. The rest of us can savor a work of narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel.

Shorto is a firm believer in presenting ideas through characters—"that's the way we transmit meaning, whether it's in a novel or nonfiction"—and The Island at the Center of the World juxtaposes the rigid, militaristic Stuyvesant and his freethinking challenger Adriaen van der Donck. (There are also some juicy cameo roles, like barmaid Griet Reyniers, who measured her customers' penises on a broomstick.) Van der Donck is a revelation, a university-trained lawyer who became fluent in Indian languages and lore, kept meticulous natural history notes, and questioned authority at every turn; Shorto calls him the first American.

Shorto has a novelist's gift for description. In cinematic terms, he's adept at both the establishing shot—his chapters open with richly evoked "master scenes"—and the close-up. "I love a good detail," he says, breaking into a grin.

Russell Shorto's writing studio is a converted family garage, with a large pile of mulch and a pink-tired child's bike just outside. His voice is low and measured, but as he perches on a tapestry chaise in his timber-framed, art-filled living room, his foot often taps the air with restless energy; he gives the impression of someone who's happiest when he's in motion.

Shorto grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania ("famous for floods"). He loved writing in school, but he didn't want to major in English. "I was convinced that being a writer didn't follow a particular path. There wasn't some Writer Corporation where you could apply for a job...I thought it had to be more complicated than that, so I made sure it was."

After studying philosophy and journalism at George Washington University, Shorto and his girlfriend (now wife) Marnie Henricksson impulsively moved to Japan. Henricksson was a Kurosawa enthusiast, and the young couple found work teaching English. They stayed long enough to get comfortable with another culture, but expatriate life didn't appeal. They moved to New York, where Shorto looked for work as a journalist and wrote children's history texts on commission, on subjects ranging from Jackie Robinson to Tecumseh to J.R.R. Tolkien. "I think I wrote 10 in a year and a half," he says now. "It was intellectual slave labor."

Eventually Shorto landed assignments at such prestigious magazines as the New Yorker, GQ, Travel and Leisure, the Nation, and the New York Times Magazine. And he started writing the first of his books for adults.

Gospel Truth: The New Image of Jesus Emerging from Science and History, and Why It Matters, which was published in 1997, had its roots in a magazine article. The search for the historical Jesus was catnip to the Catholic-raised Shorto. Although he's left the Church, he acknowledges that "there's a strong interest and attraction there, even though I've got issues... I'm always a seeker." His next book, Saints and Madmen: Psychiatry Opens Its Doors to Religion, explores the overlap between the mystical and the psychotic as altered states of consciousness. He seems to be a man of serial obsessions, who comes back time and again to themes of cultural origins.

Since the recent paperback release of The Island at the Center of the World, Shorto has booked dozens of speaking engagements, led historical walking tours, even dined with Dutch royalty. He's enjoyed the wild ride, but avres, "I do have a day job."

Shorto's current "day job" is a cover story for the New York Times Magazine on the anti-gay marriage movement; he recently flew to Bhutan for a GQ piece on the impact of two high-end boutique hotels in the previously untouristed country. This summer, he's moving his wife and two daughters to Amsterdam for a year to research his next book, Descartes' Bones. (The French philosopher and father of rationalistic inquiry moved to Holland in 1629 in search of intellectual freedom.)

After his death, Descartes' bones were dispersed, and some were taken as religious relics. As Shorto says, in that day and age, "any investigation that looked into the heart of nature was religious... Cartesians were persecuted like early Christians." The author anticipates sidelines into the origins of humanism, early science, and other aspects of social history, but "however abstract it could become, there's nothing more concrete than a bone." He grins. "That should be my mantra: Stay with the bones."