In 1664, the city was named after the Duke of York, who would become King James II of England. James's older brother, King Charles II, had chosen the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had recently taken from the Dutch.
The oldest part of the city, the island of Manhattan, still has its original Lenape name. Although Native people such as the Lenape and Canaries had lived there for many thousands of years, New York City was first explored by Europeans in the 1500s. Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano found the entrance to New York Harbor in the year 1524 he gived to this site the name of New Angoulême in the honor of Francois 1st. In 1609, the English explorer Henry Hudson rediscovered New York Harbor while looking for the Northwest Passage to the Orient for the Dutch East India Company. Hudson's first mate said it was "a very good Harbour for all windes" and the river was "a mile broad" and "full of fish".
Juan Rodriguez (transliterated to Dutch as "Jan Rodrigues") was one of the first people associated with Europe to live there. He was a merchant from Santo Domingo. He was born in Santo Domingo of Portuguese and African descent, and he came to Manhattan during the winter of 1613–14. He trapped for pelts and traded with the local people as a representative of the Dutch. Broadway, from 159th Street to 218th Street in Upper Manhattan, is named Juan Rodriguez Way in his honor.
New York City was settled by Europeans from The Netherlands in 1624. The Dutch called the whole area of New York Netherland (New Netherland) and they named a fort and town on the south end of Brooklyn.
In 1626, the Dutch colonial Director-General Peter Minuit, acting for the Dutch West India Company, bought the island of Manhattan from the "Canarsie", a small Lenape band. He paid "the value of 60 guilders" (about $900 in 2018). A false story says that Manhattan was bought for $24 worth of glass beads. 1626 was also the year the Dutch began to bring black slaves there.
After the purchase, New Amsterdam grew slowly. In 1647, Peter Stuyvesant started his job as the last Director-General of New Netherland. During this time, the number of people of New Netherland grew from 2,000 to 8,000.
Island New Amsterdam (New Amsterdam), after the capital city of the Netherlands, which was to become present-day New York. The English took over the colony in 1664 during the second Anglo-Dutch War. They changed the name to New York, to honor the Duke of York, who later became King James II of England and James VII of Scotland. The Dutch surrendered Nieuw Amsterdam without fighting.
By the time the English took New York, there were many other Dutch towns in what would become New York City, including Breukelen (Brooklyn), Vlissingen (Flushing), and Nieuw Haarlem (Harlem). There were already some English towns in the area also, such as Gravesend in Brooklyn and Newtown in Queens. Dutch, English and other people had been living together in New York for a long time.
New York became more important as a trading port while under British rule in the early 1700s. It also became a center of slavery as the British increased the slave trade and built a slave market in the city. 42% of households owned slaves by 1730, the highest percentage outside Charleston, South Carolina.
The 1735 trial and acquittal in Manhattan of John Peter Zenger, who had been accused of seditious libel after criticizing colonial governor William Cosby, helped to create the freedom of the press in North America. In 1754, Columbia University was created under charter by King George II; it was called King's College, and it was in Lower Manhattan.
New York quickly grew to become a large and important port city. The Stamp Act Congress met in New York in October 1765, as the Sons of Liberty. It organized in the city, and they skirmished over the next ten years with British troops stationed there. The important Battle of Long Island of the American Revolution was fought in Brooklyn in 1776; it was the biggest battle of the war. The Americans lost the battle. The British used the area as its headquarters for the war in North America.
New York was the capital of the United States under the Articles of Confederation from 1785 to 1788. When the US Constitution was made, it stayed as the capital from 1789 until 1790. In 1789, the first President of the United States, George Washington, was inaugurated; the first United States Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States each met for the first time, and the United States Bill of Rights was written, all at Federal Hall on Wall Street. By 1790, New York grew bigger than Philadelphia, so it become the biggest city in the United States. By the end of 1790, because of the Residence Act, Philadelphia became the new capital.
During the nineteenth century, New York City's population grew from ~60,000 to ~3.43 million. The number of black people in New York City reached more than 16,000 in 1840. Even though slavery and the slave trade were abolished in New York, the slave trade continued illegally for many years.
The Great Irish Famine brought a many Irish immigrants; more than 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, more than a quarter of the city's population. There was also many people from German provinces, and Germans made up another 25% of New York's population by 1860.
During the American Civil War, many white people in the city supported the Confederate States of America, and July 1863 they killed many black New Yorkers in a riot.
In 1898, the cities of New York and Brooklyn came together with the Bronx, Staten Island, and the western towns in Queens County to make Greater New York. This is the total area of the City of New York today. Around this time, many new immigrants came into New York City. They came in at Ellis Island, an island in New York's harbor near the Statue of Liberty. Many of them then moved to the Lower East Side neighborhood in Manhattan, which had over a million people living in just a few square miles.
Early in the twentieth century, with better transportation, more people moved to outer parts of the greater city, and many commuted to Manhattan. Many skyscrapers and other big buildings were put up to provide places to work.
In the 1970s, many jobs were lost due to industrial restructuring. This caused New York City to have economic problems and high crime rates. Though the financial industry grew, which greatly helped the city's economy in the 1980s, New York's crime rate continued to increase through that decade and into the beginning of the 1990s. By the mid 1990s, crime rates started to drop a lot due to different police strategies, better economic opportunities, gentrification, and new residents, both Americans and new immigrants from Asia and Latin America. Important new sectors, such as Silicon Alley, started in the city's economy. New York's population reached all-time highs in the 2000 census and then again in the 2010 census.
New York had most of the economic damage and biggest loss of human life from the September 11, 2001 attacks. Two of the four planes taken over that day were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, destroying them and killing 2,192 civilians, 343 firefighters, and 71 police officers. The North Tower became the tallest building ever to be destroyed anywhere.
Hurricane Sandy brought a destructive storm surge to New York City on the evening of October 29, 2012, flooding numerous streets, tunnels and subway lines in Lower Manhattan and other areas of the city and cutting off electricity in many parts of the city and its suburbs.