Dutch Americans
While the Netherlands was a small country, the Dutch Empire was quite large so emigrants leaving the mother country had a wide variety of choices. New Amsterdam was not high on their list, especially because of the Native American risk. The major Dutch cities were centers of high culture, but they still sent immigrants. Most new arrivals were farmers from remote villages who, on arrival, in America scattered into widely separated villages with little contact with one another. Even inside a settlement, different Dutch groups had minimal interaction. With very few new arrivals, the result was an increasingly traditional system cut off from the forces for change. The people maintained their popular culture, revolving around their language and their Calvinist religion. The Dutch brought along their own folklore, most famously "Sinterklaas" (the foundation of the modern day Santa Claus) and created their own as in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". They maintained their distinctive clothing, and food preferences and introduced some new foods to America, including beets, endive, spinach, parsley, and cookies.
Military history of the Netherlands
The Batavians incorrectly became regarded as the sole and eponymous ancestors of the Dutch people. The Netherlands were briefly known as the Batavian Republic. Moreover, during the time Indonesia was a Dutch colony (the Dutch East Indies), the capital (now Jakarta) was named Batavia. If the ancestry of most native Dutch people were traced back to Germanic tribes, most would lead to the Franks, Frisians and Saxons. Dutch is in fact a Low Frankish language, and is the only language (together with Afrikaans, which descends from Dutch itself) to be a direct descendant of Old Frankish, the language of the Franks.