Ric Burns’ documentary New York shows that New NL. was run by the mammoth Dutch West India Co. The city remained dedicated to the godless buck as it became British and then American.

America was built by people who came here to believe in something. America was built by people who came here for the right to believe in nothing. And two upcoming PBS documentaries are aptly paired not simply because each comes from one of the documentarian brothers Ken and Ric Burns…

Germany’s Beate Uhse acquired a Dutch chain of 44 “erotic discount centers,” plus a Dutch mail-order company that offers a full range of sex toys, videos and publications.

Sex shops: seedy, if not downright sinister; XXX signs plastered on blacked-out windows in shady neighborhoods; frequented mainly by men. When it comes to the flesh industry, Europe, for all its sophistication, wasn’t much different from the U.S. Then along came Ann Summers, a British chain of sex emporiums, and…