Fall Asleep to the REAL Price of Manhattan | It Was Never $24

Fall asleep to the true price of Manhattan — the one line of handwriting that started the story, and the half-mile rock in the Banda Sea the Dutch took instead. In 1626 a clerk in Amsterdam wrote a postscript to a letter, and four hundred years later it became the most quoted price in American history. Nobody paid twenty-four dollars. Nobody paid in worthless beads. And when the Dutch finally let the island go, they did it on purpose, for a rock you have never heard of, and for a long time it looked like the better deal. A slow, quiet, 135-minute history for sleep. No music, no shouting — a low voice, a fire, and a story told all the way to the end. Sleep well. ━ 0:00 The Letter in the Archive 2:47 One Line of Handwriting 14:19 The Man Who Invented the Price 27:05 What Sixty Guilders Actually Bought 39:06 The Money Made of Shells 50:27 The First Inflation in America 61:42 The Fur Was the Point 72:03 Nobody Was Selling Land 82:07 The Company That Did Not Want It 93:01 The Island Half a Mile Long 103:32 What a Monopoly Costs 113:25 The Swap 124:23 What Happened to the Price