History of New York City



History of New York City

The history of New York city is filled with rich and interesting facts. Numerous of the historians have frequently treated the founding of New Amsterdam by the Dutch as the footnote to the United States' history. In 1664, New Amsterdam was taken over by the British and they renamed the city to New York City. Since that period, the historians have distinguished the presence of Dutch of about over four decades as of very slight impact. However, the Dutch history played an important part in making up the New York City. This paper highlights the book, “Island at the Centre of the World,” by Russell Shorto and supports his thesis which he argues in the book. The paper also utilizes the other sources i.e. Slavery in New York, the atlas and Empires City.

Giovanni da Verrazzano discovered the New York area. In 1626 he founded the Dutch town of New Amsterdam in the southern tip of Manhattan. European settlement began in 1626 with the founding of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam on the southern edge of Manhattan (Berlin & Harris, 2005). In 1664, English ships captured the city without encountering resistance from the governor Steyvesanta, and it was renamed New York, in honor of the initiator of the attacks - the Duke of York. As a result of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667 the Dutch formally transferred to New York and in return received the British colony of Suriname (Vollmann, 1997).

In his book, Russel Shorto illustrates the recently translated documents from the colony of New Amsterdam which were written in the Dutch script of seventeenth century. These documents included letters, legal and business documents. According to Shorto, the Dutch left a more permanent impression on Manhattan and the future United States (Shorto, 2004). The historians do not give the due credit to the impact of Dutch in shaping up the United States. Between the years 1620 to 1664, during the time of the Dutch rule, the Republic of the Dutch was the most economically dynamic, tolerant and progressive country in the entire Europe. This can be proved through the argument of Shorto that the New Amsterdam drove its various ideals of democracy from its mother country, including the revolutionary idea which stated that all the colonies have the representation liberty in the democratic bodies. The West India Company was founded by the state general of the Seven United Provinces, in the year 1602 (Shorto, 2004). This was done through the insertion of a task of determining the path of North Western in Netherlands and Asia to join the freshly opened territory.

In 1609 the company's mission under the command of the English navigator Henry Hudson (Hudson), opened, examined and made ??a map Bay and the delta of the river (and later received the name of the Hudson River) on the future site of the city. The first settlement appeared in the province of the Governor's Island in the neighborhood of Manhattan ...