The Origins of New York City
Keyword(s):
New York
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In the fifteenth century, a rich coastal area along the western rim of the Atlantic Basin, now known as New York City, was on the brink of transformation. It was a quiet place where autonomous communities of egalitarian peoples, today known as the Munsee, lived. Three centuries later, that place had become the first capital of a new, slave-owning, settler nation, the United States of America, and that nation’s premier port. In between, it was first an extractive and then a settler colony of two major European powers, the Netherlands and England, and a battleground in the American Revolution. This chapter uses the results of archaeological excavations there to illuminate that dramatic transformation.