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Talk about rewriting history! Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History of New York has replaced the history of New Amsterdam with his own very humorous version of the antics of those madcap ancestors of the New Yorkers of his day. Modifying truth just enough to turn it wondrously absurd, Irving has left a charicature of the New York Dutch that I've actually seen quoted in historical volumes! When Clement Moore claimed to have had the inspiration of a rotund Dutchman as his model of Santa Claus, he was relying on the cartoon Dutch of Irving.