The Walk Back In Time program will be accompanied by a regularly rotating display of archival documents and objects, which have the power to convince visitors that they are seeing something enormously valuable, irreplaceable, and "real." The power of real objects and well-attested historical documents can scarcely be overestimated. A small number of original pieces, exhibited in a secure, climate-controlled, and flexible space, must also include well-designed interpretive aids (transcriptions, translations, enlargements, opportunities to examine the object’s physical characteristics). This feature also exemplifies the Center’s commitment to collaboration with its institutional and private collecting partners.

Examples could include:

These will be curated with or by, borrowed, or adapted from outside institutions on the Center’s advising resource committee such as the Albany Institute of History and Art; the American Museum of Natural History; the Collegiate Church Archives; the Dyckman House in Washington Heights; Historic Hudson Valley; the Hudson River Museum; the Manhattan Children’s Museum; the Museum of American Financial History; the Museum of the City of New York; the Museum of Jewish Heritage; the National Museum of the American Indian; the New Jersey Historical Society; the New Netherland Institute; the New Netherland Museum/Half Moon; the New-York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the New York State Museum and Archives; the South Street Seaport Museum; the Wyckoff and Lott house museums in Brooklyn; and others.

Examples, which are endless, could include:

1) "Childhood in New Amsterdam," to be developed with the Manhattan Children’s Museum

2) "Slavery and the Dutch," to be developed with the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library and the African Burial Ground project

3) "Dutch Shipbuilding and Navigation in the 17^th Century," to be developed with South Street Seaport Museum, Half Moon, and the Zuider Zee Museum

4) Rotating exhibits investigating the lure and profit values of specific commodities that drove global exploration and tensions in the 17^th-century — e.g., sugar, salt, timber, cod, spices, animal furs. These would ideally be launched with a special exhibition about the fluctuations of the trade in beaver pelts in colonial New Netherland, developed collaboratively with the American Museum of Natural History.

5) "The Amsterdam Left Behind," exploring the culture, trade, belief systems, and state of "opportunities" in New Amsterdam’s contemporaneous namesake city in Holland, to be developed with the Amsterdam Historical Museum.

6) "The Mystery and Mining of New Amsterdam’s Forgotten Documents," based on Russell Shorto’s discussion of the records-cleansing by the Dutch West India Company in the 1700s; the migrations of surviving documents from early New Netherland settlements to Europe, and eventually back to Albany; the challenges of preserving and decoding them; and what recent translation efforts and new scholarship focused on such records have revealed about the nature of life in New Amsterdam), to be curated by the New Netherland Institute.

7) "New Amsterdam North": 17^th-century Fort Orange / Beaverwyck, a show adapted from Charles Gehring’s 2006 exhibition in Albany

8) "Defending New Amsterdam" would explore the erratic efforts to sustain fortifications and various military strategies undertaken to consolidate the colony’s power; to be developed in partnership with Historic Battery Park; Governor’s Island Preservation and Education Corporation; and the National Museum of the American Indian.

9) "Feeding the Colony" would investigate foodways; animal husbandry, breweries; melding of old, new, and native American "cuisines," to be developed in partnership with the Albany Institute of History and Art, with Peter Rose, the leading culinary scholar of Dutch foodways in the New World.

10) "The Evolution of Christmas in New York: How the Dutch Made St. Nicholas into Santa Claus,"to be developed in partnership with the New-York Historical Society.

11) "The $24 Myth," based on the 1999 school-oriented exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, which explored the facts and fantasy surrounding the celebrated purchase of Manhattan in 1626; these exhibit scripts and didactic panels could be recreated.

12) "Testing Tolerance" would investigate the motives and realities of Dutch relationships with New Amsterdam’s dissenting immigrants — Jews, Africans, Native peoples, English pirates and Long Islanders, Swedes, and other players in the New Netherland saga; to be developed in collaboration with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the NMIA, and the proposed Living Museum to Tolerance/Governor’s Island.

The New Amsterdam History Center will make a special effort to accommodate and support the work of elementary and secondary school teachers and students, and other developers of educational programs relating to its Core Themes, across the metropolitan area. The History Center will develop and offer its own field study programs. These will involve an active engagement with the exhibits offered at the History Center, tours of downtown Manhattan, and special programs that involve sister institutions. The excellent educational work of the New Netherland Museum/Half Moon should be a model for this process.

These educational programs should always aim to integrate the on-site visit experience into a curricular program of pre- and post-visit classroom exercises. The visit to the Center will not, therefore, be just a day out of school but a special opportunity to bring the in-school learning experience to life. There should always be an emphasis on learning experiences that are not ordinarily available in the classroom; lecturing and showing slides to children is not a good use of their precious time away from school.

A school visit "workshop" will provide special in-depth learning opportunities for student groups coming to the History Center. It may include hands-on activities like making maps or models of early New Amsterdam, investigating carefully made reproductions of historical documents and artifacts, role-playing historical situations, and gathering ideas, information, and images for classroom-based exercises.

Rather than develop its own curricula per se, the History Center will assist teachers, supervisors, and administrators in creating curricula that adopt historical and community resources (like historic sites and geographical features) for use in their educational programs. Adjoining the student workshop will be a library/laboratory for teachers to use in development and training sessions. The Teacher Center will be stocked with reference materials, computers with access to Websites with valuable resources, and hard-copy examples of successful programs developed by other teachers — all of which can be borrowed or duplicated by participating teachers. The Teacher Center could house programs sponsored by the city’s Education Department, teacher unions, colleges and universities, and community education specialists.

A special commitment will be made to the sister cultural institutions of the History Center. Many area museums and historic sites already have school and family programs that address aspects of New York’s Dutch colonial past. Annually, a delegation drawn from such groups should be invited to show off their programs to teachers at "A Program Slam" at the History Center. Here they can distribute their literature and introduce their sites to people organizing educational programs for adults and children.

The Teaching and Learning Center will also accommodate special programs developed for youth groups like the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, for special groups visiting from the Netherlands, and for annual Elderhostel and other lifelong learning courses.

These would include talks, workshops, family projects, book discussions, and field visits that are of consistently high caliber, seasonally attuned, and rigorously on topic. Suggestions include an annual St. Nicholas Day party for downtown families; a narrated, summer sail on the Half Moon; a Dutch "family genealogy" workshop co-hosted by the Holland Society or New York Genealogical and Biographical Library; fall and winter talks by eminent historians, authors, or filmmakers.

This weekend event, with scholarly papers, popular presentations, performances, and special thematic tours, could be co-sponsored with CUNY’s Gotham Center, the New Netherland Institute, the Holland Society, and the New Netherland Museum / Half Moon.

Because the South Street Seaport Museum has shut its archaeology lab for lack of funds to sustain it, a portion of those collections might be transferred on loan to the Center, with a didactic panel exhibit about how modern urban archaeology in lower Manhattan is contributing to our understanding of New Amsterdam. These "shards" from the past could make an interesting, interpretive display within the coffee house setting, too.

 Implementation plans for the build-out of the New Amsterdam History Center are underway and  expected to be guided by the market and feasibility study.  This new venture is independent and separate from another vision for a New Amsterdam related project on Governor's Island.