Centuries of unwanted and lost items – from medieval shoes to modern cellphones – are helping to tell the story of Amsterdam’s urban history from a fresh perspective. Some 700,000 artifacts were ...

Russell Shorto's The Island at the Centre of the World (2004) must always be near the top of the list of great books about New York. Revelling in the heaps of recently translated records from the 17th ...

Carved in stone over the front entrance to the Amsterdam Free Library at Church and Grove streets are the words, “Open to All.” Generations of Amsterdamians are familiar with the interior of the ...

Ted Krown of Amsterdam was 16 when he went to work at Larrabee’s, a Market Street hardware store. Krown was a salesman at Larrabee’s for more than 50 years. During the 1969 company Christmas party at ...

Simply sign up to the Life & Arts myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, by Russell Shorto, Little, Brown RRP£25 / Doubleday RRP$28.95, ...