A.Th. van Deursen

A.Th. van Deursen (1931 - 2011) was professor emeritus of modern history at the Free University of Amsterdam. He was unrivaled among Dutch historians in his grasp of seventeenth-century Dutch society.

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In 1991, he published his Mensen van klein vermogen (Plain Lives in a Golden Age) and in 1994 his highly successful Een dorp in de polder. Graft in de zeventiende eeuw (A Village in the Polder). Maurice of Nassau was longlisted for the prestiguous AKO-prize for literature.

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A.Th. van Deursen

A Village in the Polder

Anyone familiar with the Dutch Golden Age knows something about senior civic dignitaries: municipal regents, clergymen, stadtholders, army commanders and admirals. But what about the lives of ordinary people not in the top echelons, not in charge of municipal government, not army commanders or authors of important books? The answer to that question has been given by the historian A.Th. van Deursen in 'Een dorp in de polder'. In this fascinating history of a village, he draws on an astonishing quantity of archival material to bring to life the people of Graft, a village in the Dutch countryside some twelve miles north of Amsterdam.

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