New Amsterdam was a 17th-century Dutch settlement established at the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as the seat of the colonial government in New Netherland. The initial trading factory gave rise to the settlement around Fort Amsterdam. The fort was situated on the strategic southern tip of the island of Manhattan and was meant to defend the fur trade operations of the Dutch West India Company in the North River. In 1624, it became a provincial extension of the Dutch Republic and was designated as the capital of the province in 1625. New Amsterdam became a city when it received municipal rights on February 2, 1653.
New Netherland was a 17th-century colonial province of the Dutch Republic located on the east coast of what is now the United States of America. The claimed territories extended from the Delmarva Peninsula to Cape Cod. Settlements were established in what became the states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut, with small outposts in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
The written history of New York City began with the first European explorer, the Italian Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524. European settlement began with the Dutch in 1608 and New Amsterdam was founded in 1624.
Willem Verhulst or Willem van Hulst was an employee of the Dutch West India Company and the second (provisional) Director of the New Netherland colony in 1625–26. Nothing can be verified about his life before and after this period. Verhulst may have consummated the purchase of Manhattan Island on behalf of the Dutch West India Company, although there is still considerable debate over the evidence that also supports the purchase by Peter Minuit.
Paulus Hook is a community on the Hudson River waterfront in Jersey City, New Jersey. It is located one mile across the river from Manhattan. The name Hook comes from the Dutch word "hoeck", which translates to "point of land." This "point of land" has been described as an elevated area, the location of which today is bounded by Montgomery, Hudson, Dudley, and Van Vorst Streets.
The history of New York City has been influenced by the prehistoric geological formation during the last glacial period of the territory that is today New York City. The area was shortly inhabited by the Lenape; after initial European exploration in the 17th century, the Dutch established New Amsterdam in 1624. In 1664, the British conquered the area and renamed it New York.
The history of New York City (1665–1783) began with the establishment of English rule over Dutch New Amsterdam and New Netherland. As the newly renamed City of New York and surrounding areas developed, there was a growing independent feeling among some, but the area was decidedly split in its loyalties. The site of modern New York City was the theater of the New York Campaign, a series of major battles in the early American Revolutionary War. After that, the city was under British occupation until the end of the war and was the last port British ships evacuated in 1783.
Whitehall Street is a street in the South Ferry/Financial District neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City, near the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The street begins at Bowling Green to the north, where it is a continuation of the southern end of Broadway. Whitehall Street stretches four blocks to the southern end of FDR Drive, adjacent to the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall Terminal, on landfill beyond the site of Peter Stuyvesant's 17th-century house.
The history of cartography refers to the development and consequences of cartography, or mapmaking technology, throughout human history. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to cartography:
Giacomo Gastaldi was an Italian cartographer, astronomer and engineer of the 16th century. Gastaldi began his career as an engineer, serving the Venetian Republic in that capacity until the fourth decade of the sixteenth century. From about 1544 he turned his attention entirely to mapmaking, and his work represents several important turning points in cartographic development.
The Castello Plan – officially entitled Afbeeldinge van de Stadt Amsterdam in Nieuw Neederlandt – is an early city map of what is now the Financial District of Lower Manhattan from an original of 1660. It was created by Jacques Cortelyou, a surveyor in what was then called New Amsterdam – later renamed by the settlers of the Province of New York settlement as New York City, with its Fort Amsterdam, the center of trade and government. The map that is presently in the New York Public Library is a copy created around 1665 to 1670 by an unknown draughtsman from a lost Cortelyou original.
New Netherlanders were residents of New Netherland, the seventeenth-century colonial outpost of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands on the northeastern coast of North America, centered on the Hudson River and New York Bay, and in the Delaware Valley.
Wolfert Gerritse Van Couwenhoven, also known as Wolphert Gerretse van Kouwenhoven and Wolphert Gerretsen, was an original patentee, director of bouweries (farms), and founder of the New Netherland colony.
Peter Minuit Plaza is an urban square serving the intermodal transportation hub at South Ferry, and lies at the intersection of State Street and Whitehall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. The plaza is a heavy pedestrian traffic area just north of the Staten Island Ferry Whitehall Terminal and includes two exits for the New York City Subway's South Ferry/Whitehall Street station as well as the M15 SBS South Ferry Bus Loop at Peter Minuit Place, making this a busy intersection that is used by approximately 70,000 residents and visitors daily.
The Land of the Blacks was a village settled by people of African descent north of the wall of New Amsterdam from about 1643 to 1716. It represented an economic, legal and military modus vivendi reached with the Dutch West India Company in the wake of Kieft's War. This buffer area with the native Lenape is sometimes considered the first free African settlement in North America, although the landowners had half-free status. Its name comes from descriptions in 1640s land conveyances of white-owned properties as bordering the hereditament or freehold "of the Blacks".
Stuyvesant Farm, also known as the Great Bowery, was the estate of Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch director-general of the colony of New Netherland, as well as his predecessors and later his familial descendants. The land was at first designated Bowery No. 1, the largest and northernmost of six initial estates of the Dutch West India Company north of New Amsterdam, used as the official residence and economic support for Willem Verhulst and all subsequent directors of the colony.
The Manatus Map is a 1639 pictorial map of the New York–New Jersey Harbor Estuary at the time the area was part of the colony of New Netherland. Entitled Manatvs gelegen op de Noort Rivier it shows the geographic features of the region, as well as New Amsterdam and other New Netherland settlements. The map was drafted when Willem Kieft was Director of New Netherland.
The Sawkill mill was a sawmill and slave quarters established by the Dutch West India Company in 1626, as part of the construction of New Netherland, a colonial province in North America. The mill was located at the mouth of the Sawkill, a stream that originated in what is now Central Park in New York City, and flowed into the East River. The slaves, who were mostly men, cut wood for the new colony and floated the logs which were guided by boat to New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland. The mill and the slave quarters are depicted on The Manatus map of 1639, the oldest map of Manhattan Island, which shows the Saw-Kill as a slave settlement of the Dutch West India Company, not as a mill site. This implies that by 1639, the Saw-Kill mill had reduced its wood-cutting activities.
