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In 1609, Henry Hudson entered the harbor a commission from the Dutch East India Company in search of the Northwest Passage. Hudson may have interacted with Native Americans on Manhattan, and sailed up the river that now bears his name as far as Albany. Although Hudson did not find the passage he was seeking, his reports led to further commercial expeditions financed by Dutch East India Company with the intent of establishing fur trading factorijs in the area.

As in all fifty states, the head of the executive branch of government is a Governor. The legislative branch is called the Legislature and consists of a Senate and an Assembly. Unlike most States, the New York electoral law permits electoral fusion, and New York ballots tend to have, in consequence, a larger number of parties on them, some being permanent minor parties that seek to influence the major parties and others being ephemeral parties formed to give major-party candidates an additional line on the ballot.

The period played host to much racial tension in the city, including the highly-publicized murders of three African-Americans in "white" neighborhoods in separate incidents (Willie Turks in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn in 1982; Michael Griffith in Howard Beach, Queens in 1986; and Yusef Hawkins in Brooklyn's Bensonhurst neighborhood in 1989.

At the retreat of the ice sheet, Staten Island and Long Island were not yet separated by the Narrows, which had not yet formed. Geologists reckoning of the course of the Hudson River have placed it alternatively through the present course of the Raritan River, south of the island, as well through present-day Flushing Bay and Jamaica Bay.

NYSE trades, unlike those on some other more "virtual" exchanges (e.g. NASDAQ), always involve face-to-face communication in a particular physical location. There is one station at each post on the trading floor for each of the exchange's stocks.

In the 1800s these social antipodes could be found in the contrast between rich commercial stretches of Broadway and residential stretches moving with fashion, from Lafayette Street (1820s) and Washington Square and Gramercy Park (1830s), to take up even more extravagant residence on Fifth Avenue— and the almost unbelievably squalid enclave of Five Points (abject poverty later to occupy the Lower East Side).

New York City has a population of over 8 million people contained within 309 square miles (800 km˛). Immigrants from over 180 countries live in the city, making it one of the most cosmopolitan places on earth. People from all over the United States are also attracted to New York City for its culture, energy, cosmopolitanism, and by their own hope of making it big in the "Big Apple".

On April 1, 1788, the entire Massachusetts preemptive right -- comprising some 6,000,000 acres (24,000 km˛) -- was sold to Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham, both of Massachusetts. This sale was of the preemptive right for all land west of a line running from the mouth of Sodus Bay on Lake Ontario, due south to the 82nd milestone on the Pennsylvania border near Big Flats (the "Pre-emption Line") all the way to the Niagara River and Lake Erie.

When his term "Adirondack Park" led to some derision and fears from longtime residents of the area that they might be bought out and evicted, proponents of the idea began to use "Adirondack Forest Preserve" instead. Both terms continue in use to thise day, with the former referring to the land inside the Blue Line and the latter to that portion owned by the state.

At the time of the arrival of the first Europeans, the area around what would later be called New York Bay was populated primarily by the Munsee branch of the Lenape, a people in the ethnic and linguistic Algonquian family, loosely connected by a common language.

An electrical blackout rolled through the Northeastern United States and Southern Canada on August 14, 2003 at 4:11 PM, leaving many areas, including NYC, without electricity for over a day. There was no major looting or other crime, unlike in the blackout of 1977.

Following this treaty, there were various groups attempting to circumvent the treaty and directly obtain title from the Indians. For example, in 1787 John Livingston, Col. John Butler, Samuel Street, a Capt. Powell, and Lt. William Johnston attempted to circumvent the Treaty of Hartford by purporting to purchase a 999-year lease of about 8 million acres (32,000 km˛) from the Iroquois. This lease, however, was promptly declared void by both the New York and the Massachusetts legislatures.

Culturally New York became a truly international city, rather than a great American city, with the influx of intellectual, musical and artistic European refugees that started in the late 1930s. After the war New York inherited the role of Paris as center of the art world with Abstract Expressionism, and became a rival to London as an art market. However, the city lost two baseball teams to California, the Dodgers and the Giants, in the late 1950s. They were replaced by the Mets.