History of New York City (prehistory-1664)
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The history of New York City (prehistory-1664) began with the geological formation of the peculiar territory of what is today New York City. The area was long inhabited by the Lenape; after initial European exploration, the Dutch established New Amsterdam and New Netherland. In 1664, the British conquered the area and renamed it New York.
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[edit] Prehistoric era
About 75,000 years ago, during the last ice age, the area of present day New York City was at the edge of the ice sheet that stretched down from Canada. The ice sheet covered the site of the present city to a depth of approximately 1000 feet (300 m). The glaciers scraped off much of the top layers of material in the region, exposing underlying much-older bedrock, including gneiss and marble that dates from 500 million years ago.
Approximately 15,000 years ago, when the ice sheet began retreating, the glacier left behind a terminal moraine that now forms the hills of Long Island and Staten Island. The two islands were not yet separated by the Narrows, which were formed approximately 6,000 years ago when the waters of the Upper Bay broke through in the Lower Bay.
Archeological excavations indicate that the first humans settled the area as early as 9,000 years ago. These early inhabitants left behind hunting implements and bone heaps. The area was abandoned, however, possibly because the warming climate of the region lead to the local extinction of many larger game species upon which the early inhabitants depended for food.
A second wave of inhabitants entered the region approximately 3,000 years ago and left behind more advanced hunting implements such as bows and arrows. The remains of approximately 80 such early encampments have been found throughout the city. The region has probably remained continually inhabited from that time.
[edit] Lenape inhabitants
- Main article: Lenape
At the time of the arrival of the first Europeans, the area around what would later be called New York Bay was populated primarily by the Munsee branch of the Lenape, a people in the ethnic and linguistic Algonquian family, loosely connected to them by a common language-root. The Lenape called the region Scheyischbi, or "the place bordering the ocean", and perhaps Lenapehoking, meaning "place where the Lenape dwell," although there is not universal agreement among scholars regarding this. The Lenape hunted, fished (sometimes using weirs), and gathered roughly 150 species of edible wild plants, as well as using slash and burn agriculture, with the women sowing such crops as the "Three Sisters" of maize, beans, and squash. The harbor and rivers also provided for rich fishing, especially of oyster and striped bass.
The Lenape lived in small inter-connected groups moving seasonally from camp to camp and, according to best historical analysis, had no concept of private ownership of land. The Lenape had no written language, but many New York place names are derived phonetically from the original Lenape words, including Raritan Bay between Staten Island and New Jersey, Rockaway in Queens, and Canarsie in Brooklyn. Manhattan is a phonetic interpretation of a word in the Munsee dialect meaning 'hilly island.' In addition to water travel, the Lenape moved through the region on an extensive system of trails, many of which would later become major roads and thoroughfares of the city.
The Lenape engaged a network of trade among themselves and with other tribes in northeastern North America through a system of barter. The principal medium of barter was wampum, which largely consisted of ornamented hand-made belts of crafted purple and white mollusk shells. The particular species required for wampum was found exclusively in the areas around Long Island Sound, in areas controlled by the Pequots. Archaeological evidence of wampum manufactured in the New York area has been found throughout the Northeast and Great Lakes area, indicating an extensive trading network that flourished among the Lenape and other Native ethnic groups such as the Iroquois, who at times inhabited the area of present-day western New York State. In a sense, New York City was a commercial center even before the arrival of the Europeans.
[edit] European exploration
The first European to see the harbor was Giovanni da Verrazzano, during his expedition of 1524 and named it Nouvelle-Angoulême. Verrazzano entered the harbor on April 17 and set anchor in the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, where he was greeted by a canoe party of Lenape. In 1609, Henry Hudson entered the harbor on a commission from the Dutch East India Company in search of the Northwest Passage. Hudson may have interacted with Native Americans on Manhattan, and sailed up the river that now bears his name as far as Albany. Although Hudson did not find the passage he was seeking, his reports led to further commercial expeditions financed by Dutch East India Company with the intent of establishing fur trading factorijs in the area. At the time in Europe, beaver pelts were of prized value, and the trade in the Dutch East India Company believed it had found a possible source of lucrative trade in the new unexplored area. In 1613, Dutch navigator Adriaen Block spent the winter on lower Manhattan with his crew, then built a new ship in the following spring, which he sailed through up the East River and through Hell Gate, becoming the first European to recognize Long Island as an island. Block christened the coast as New Netherland and his company received exclusive trading rights in the area.
[edit] Dutch settlement
- Main article: New Amsterdam
In 1613 the Dutch established a trading post at the west shores of lower Manhattan Island in the area of present Church Street where the WTC was located, this is the beginning of what centuries later would become the financial capital of the world, obtaining thus a commercial spirit from its very humble beginnings.
Among its first settlers were Christian Hendriksen (who could be considered as a founder of New York City) and Jan Rodrigues the first black man to live in this city.
In 1614 the New Netherlands company was established and consequently they settled a second fur trading post in what is today Albany, called Fort Nassau. This is considered one of the oldest capital cities in the US.
In 1616 they also settled a trading post in the Kingston area.
It was not until 1623, however, that the Dutch interests in the area were other than commercial and under the auspices of the newly formed Dutch West India Company they built Fort Amsterdamin 1624, a crude fortification that stood on the location of the present Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House on Bowling Green. The fort was designed mainly to protect the company's trading operations further upriver from attack by other European powers. Within a year, a small settlement, called New Amsterdam had grown around the fort, with a population that included mostly the garrison of company troops, as well as a contigent of Walloon families who were brought in primarily to farm the nearby land of lower Manhattan and supply the company operations with food.
The Dutch took heavy advantage of the Native American reliance on wampum as a trading medium by exchanging cheap European-made metal tools for beaver pelts. By using such tools, the Natives greatly increased the rate of production of wampum, debasing its value for trade. Lenape men abandoned hunting and fishing for food in favor of beaver trapping. Moreover, the Dutch themselves began manufacturing their own wampum with superior tools in order to further dominate the trading network among themselves and the Natives (a practice undertaken by the settlers in New England as well). As a result of this increase, beavers were largely trapped out in the Five Boroughs within two decades, leaving the Lenape largely dependent on the Dutch completely. As a result, the Native population declined drastically throughout the 17th century through a combination of disease, starvation, and outward migration.
As the beaver trade increasingly shifted to Upstate New York, New Amsterdam became an increasingly important trading hub for the coast of North America. Since New Netherland was a trading operation, and not viewed as colonization enterprise for transplanting Dutch culture, the directors of New Netherland were largely unconcerned with the ethnic and racial balance of the community. The economic activity brought in a wide variety of ethnic groups to the fledging city during the 17th century, including Spanish, Jews, and Africans, some of them as slaves.
The Dutch origins can still be seen in many names in New York City, such as Coney Island (from "Konijnen Eiland" - Dutch for "Rabbit Island"), Brooklyn (from Breukelen), Harlem from Haarlem (formalized in 1658 as Nieuw Haarlem), the Bronx (from Pieter Bronck), Flushing (from Vlissingen) and Staten Island (from "Staaten Eylandt").
The island of Manhattan was in some measure self-selected as a future metropolis by its extraordinary natural harbor formed by New York Bay (actually the drowned lower river valley of the Hudson River, enclosed by glacial moraines), the East River (actually a tidal strait) and the Hudson River, all of which are confluent at the southern tip, from which all later development spread. Also of prime importance was the presence of deep fresh water aquifers near the southern tip, especially the Collect Pond, and an unusually varied geography ranging from marshland to large outcrops of Manhattan schist, an extremely hard metamorphic rock that is ideal as an anchor for the foundations of large buildings.
[edit] Arrival of the British
In 1664, British ships entered Gravesend Bay, in modern Brooklyn, and troops marched to capture the ferry across the East River to the city, with minimal resistance: the governor at the time, Peter Stuyvesant, was unpopular with the residents of the city. Articles of Capitulation were drawn up, the Dutch West India Company's colors were struck on September 8, 1664, and the soldiers of the garrison marched to the East River for the trip home to the Netherlands. The date of 1664 appeared on New York City's corporate seal until 1975, when the date was changed to 1625 to reflect the year of Dutch incorporation as a city, and to incidentally allow New York to celebrate its 350th anniversary just 11 years after its 300th.
The British renamed the colony New York, after the king's brother James, Duke of York and on June 12, 1665 appointed Thomas Willett the first of the mayors of New York. The city grew northward, and remained the largest and most important city in the colony of New York.
[edit] See also
- History of New York City (1665-1783)
- New York and its origins. Legend and Reality (about the really walloon origin of New York City).
