New York City

**New York City** (**NYC**) is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of the state of New York. In 1624, Dutch colonists led by Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape for $24 and established a trading post, New Amsterdam which became part of the city in 1653, and it was captured by the English in 1664 during the Anglo-Dutch Wars and renamed to "New York" in honor of the Duke of York, the future King James II of England. The city was briefly reoccupied by the Dutch from 1673 to 1674. New York became a center of the banking and shipping industries, and it also had a large slave population during the early 18th century; many of these slaves, freed by the British during their occupation of New York City from 1776 to 1783 during the American Revolutionary War, would be resettled in Nova Scotia, Britain, or the Caribbean. Much of the city was destroyed by a "great fire" in 1776, shortly after the British occupied the city following the American defeat at the Battle of Long Island, but New York City was quickly rebuilt and was designated the capital of the United States in 1785. In 1790, the capital was moved to Philadelphia, although New York City surpassed Philadelphia in size that same year. Over the course of the 19th century, New York City's population exploded from 60 thousands to 3.43 million, as New York became a national and international trading center, became a hub of immigrants under the auspices of the Irish and German-backed Democratic Tammany Hall political machine, and both industrialized and expanded. In 1898, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx were consolidated with New York County (Manhattan) to form the modern city of New York, now with five boroughs. The 20th century saw New York's increasing diversification due to the Great Migration of African-Americans from the rural American South to the industrialized cities of the North, immigration from Eastern Europe (predominantly Jews and Poles), Central Europe (notably from Germany) and Southern Europe (especially Italians), and an influx of Puerto Rican and other Hispanic immigrants after World War II. Following the war, parts of the city experienced "white flight" as middle-class white families flocked to the suburbs or more expensive parts of the city in response to an influx of non-white (mostly Black and Hispanic) immigrants to neighborhoods like The Bronx and Brooklyn. The deindustrialization and urban of New York during the 1970s led to a skyrocketing crime rate which endured into the 1990s, but revised police strategies, the revival of the financial sector, gentrification, and the arrival of new residents from other parts of America, from Asia, and from Latin America led to a decline in crime rates. New York City suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in American history on 11 September 2001, when two passenger planes were hijacked by Islamist terrorists belonging to al-Qaeda and crashed them into the World Trade Center, killing 2,192 civilians, 343 firefighters, and 71 police officers. New York was again the center of national attention in 2011 due to the "Occupy Wall Street" protests breaking out in response to social and economic inequality in the aftermath of the Great Recession. In 2020, New York City became the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic after the virus spread from Wuhan, China worldwide; New York overtook Wuhan as the epicenter and suffered over 30 thousand COVID-related deaths during the pandemic.

In 2020, New York City had a population of 8,804,190 people, of whom 30.9% were non-Hispanic whites, 28.7% Hispanics, 20.2% African-Americans, 15.6% Asians, and .2% Native American; 37% of the city's population was foreign-born (mostly from the Dominican Republic, China, Mexico, Guyana, Jamaica, Ecuador, Haiti, India, Russia, and Trinidad and Tobago). This marked a drastic contrast from the city's demographics in 1940, when whites (including the descendants of recent German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants) made up 92% of the city's population. New York City is home to the United States' largest Asian community and fastest-growing Chinese community, as well as the largest White population of any American city (in 2012, including 560,000 Italian-Americans, 385,000 Irish-Americans, 253,000 German-Americans, 223 thousand Russian-Americans, 201,000 Polish-Americans, 137,000 English-Americans, 65,000 Greek-Americans, 65,000 French-Americans, 60 thousand Hungarian-Americans, 55 thousand Ukrainian-Americans, 35,000 Scottish-Americans, and 30,838 Spanish-Americans). More than half of America's Central Asian immigrants live in Queens and Brooklyn, while there is also a large Albanian community in The Bronx and 160,000 Arabs (primarily in Brooklyn). 20% of Indian-Americans and 15% of Korean-Americans live in New York City. In 2014, 33% of New Yorkers were Catholic, 23% Protestant, 3% other Christian, 24% unaffiliated, 8% Jewish, 3% Hindu, 3% Muslim, 1% Buddhist, and 1% other. By 2016, 69% of registered voters in New York City were Democrats and 10% Republicans, and New York City voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1924, when the Republican Calvin Coolidge won all five boroughs.

## Gallery

New York in 1776.New York in 1840.New York in the 1920's.New York in the 1950's.New York in the 1980's.New York in 2022.