Mark Thompson is a historian of colonial America and a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. A native of New Orleans, he studied under Jack Greene at Johns Hopkins University before moving to Baton Rouge. He and Colin met at LSU, where Mark was teaching and Colin was a graduate student. They talk about Mark’s path to becoming a historian, surviving Louisiana, and his book The Contest for the Delaware Valley: Allegiance, Identity, and Empire in the Seventeenth Century (LSU Press, 2013). What was the story of the Dutch in the New World? Did they really buy Manhattan for $24? And how might their story affect how we think of the development of early American history?