The British Crown is a useless anachronism.

Foofie is Dutch ... which is only a whisper from being Deutsch.

On August 27, 1664, while England and the Dutch Republic were at peace, four English frigates sailed into New Amsterdam's harbor and demanded New Netherland's surrender, whereupon New Netherland was provisionally ceded by director-general Peter Stuyvesant. This resulted in the Second Anglo-Dutch War, between England and the Dutch Republic. In June 1665, New Amsterdam was reincorporated under English law as New York City, named after the Duke of York (later King James II). He was brother of the English King Charles II, who had been granted the lands.

Foofie wrote:

These girls were smart, in my opinion, since with the one life they had to live, they chose a life in the US, and their children and future descendants never would have to worry about a foreign power threatening them.

... but if they had stayed in Britain they wouldn't have had to worry about that either, or at any rate not any more than in the USA of the Cold War. As it was they had to put up with living in a country full of hokey dick heads wearing cowboy hats and saying "yee-haw" all the time, when they weren't busy getting obese on Hostess Twinkies and chawing on 97 ounce steaks.

Like I said.

Foofie is Dutch ... which is only a whisper from being Deutsch.

You have absolutely no idea on England...and while I love America for all those things you mention there's allot more going on in the world worth seeing pal...

The diversity, such as it was, was brought to these shores by the Dutch. The English colonies were abject failures, they starved to death in Virginia and barely held on to sanity in Massachusetts Bay. The Dutch knew what they were doing, building a commercial enterprise and the rule is "A customer is a customer."
Despite the British efforts to denigrate the Dutch after taking over, putting into the language such putdowns as :
"You'll be in dutch if you do that." Trouble.
"Going dutch on a deal (or a date) " Everybody pays for their own
"I'm going to treat you like a dutch uncle." Severe discipline.
and others, they weren't able to wrest from the citizens of New York the idea that had been brewing in the city since earlier days~good commerce means not only free trade but free men. (Well, white men anyway.)

If Yonker Adriaen van der Donck had just had a few more years on this earth, we would see him as the true Father of American freedom.

And the Dutch are still here, look at a Mets cap~ those are the colors of the Dutch flag.

Joe(and yes, Yonkers is where Adriaen had his farm)Nation

So, please do not tell me to leave the center of my universe.

The American culture is, in my opinion, quite seductive,

The Duke of York may have marched his ten thousand men to the top of some hill, but I don't think it was New Amsterdam(New York). We don't have any hills.

Edgar Allan Poe spent the last years of his life, from 1846 to 1849, in The Bronx at Poe Cottage, now located at Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse. A small wooden farmhouse built about 1812, the cottage once commanded unobstructed vistas over the rolling Bronx hills to the shores of Long Island. It was a bucolic setting in which the great writer penned many of his most enduring poetical works, including “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells” and “Eureka.”