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Peter Minuit

3rd Director of New Netherland (1626–31)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 7, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Peter Minuit was a Walloon merchant and politician who was the 3rd director of the Dutch North American colony of New Netherland from 1626 until 1631, and 3rd Governor of New Netherland. He founded the Swedish colony of New Sweden on the Delaware Peninsula in 1638.

Editorial summary

“Peter Minuit” enters the record as 3rd Director of New Netherland (1626–31). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Peter, Minuit and Director can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1626, 1631, 1638—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Peter, Minuit and Director.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Peter Minuit” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Peter, Minuit and Director provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1626, 1631 and 1638.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Peter Minuit”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Peter Minuit primary sources, Peter Minuit archive and Peter research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Peter Minuit”?
  2. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Peter Minuit” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.