**“Newcomers illuminates a vibrant, teeming story of ambition, struggle, and hard-won success, unfolding in a world that the standard accounts banish to the footnotes.” —John Matteson One of Lithub's "Ten Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in May" and Book Culture's "Most-Anticipated New Books for May 2026"** A man thought to be a Muslim from Morocco and a German barmaid fleeing poverty are hardly the images we have of America’s august founders. In Newcomers, Alan Mikhail upends the traditional story of America’s origins through the revelatory tale of a seventeenth-century immigrant couple by the names of Anthony and Grietje. Married in Amsterdam, the destitute pair emerged from lives of piracy and prostitution in Europe and arrived in 1630s Dutch New Amsterdam, hoping to build a new life. Upon landing on New York City’s shores, the swarthy Anthony was attacked for being the Muslim he was not, while Grietje, branded a whore by crude harbor denizens, would become the model of an independent colonial American woman, defiantly mooning her attackers rather than accepting their derision. They endured intense bigotry on crooked neighborhood warrens and in the primitive watering holes of New Amsterdam, battling Dutch authorities and brawling with their neighbors, their appearances in court so frequent that their rebellious existence is seared into the records of early America forever. Eventually ejected from New Amsterdam by Dutch authorities in 1639, they were exiled to the “frontier,” to what is now Gravesend Brooklyn, where they and their four daughters farmed and seized land from Native Americans while fighting English colonists from the north. After Grietje died, Anthony moved back to what had become English Manhattan and ended up being one of the richest men in seventeenth-century New York.