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The British conquest of Manhattan was completed with the fall of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776, and thereafter they held the city without challenge until 1783. 'Evacuation Day', in which the last British troops and many Tory supporters departed in September 1783, was long celebrated in New York.

In 1661, the first permanent Dutch settlement was established at Oude Dorp (Dutch for "Old Village"), just south of the Narrows near South Beach, by a small group of Dutch Walloon and Huguenot families.

The Hudson is crossed at numerous points by bridges and tunnels. The width of the river in its southern half required major feats of engineering to bridge, the results today visible in the Verrazano-Narrows and George Washington Bridges, as well as the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

New York City serves as an enormous engine for the global economy, and is home to more Fortune 500 companies than anywhere else in the country. Its estimated gross metropolitan product of US$488.8 billion in 2003 was the largest of any city in the United States and the sixth largest if compared to any U.S. State. If it were a nation, the city would have the 16th highest gross domestic product in the world, exceeding that of Russia ($433 billion).

Long Island is home to numerous colleges, including Stony Brook University, Southampton College, Hofstra University, and SUNY-Old Westbury. It is also home to the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League. The world's largest thoroughbred racetrack, Belmont Park, is located in the Nassau County community of Elmont.

At Chautauqua Lake in the southwestern portion of the state is the Chautauqua Institution, co-founded by Methodist Rev. John Vincent and devoted to adult continuing education in a uplifting setting, as that ambiance was understood in the last half of the Nineteenth Century.

The island of Manhattan was in some measure self-selected as a future metropolis by its extraordinary natural harbor formed by New York Bay (actually the drowned lower river valley of the Hudson River, enclosed by glacial moraines), the East River (actually a tidal strait) and the Hudson River, all of which are confluent at the southern tip, from which all later development spread.

Besides the many private colleges and universities in the state, New York, like many other states, operates its own system of institutions of higher learning known as the State University of New York System (SUNY). New York City operates the City University of New York (CUNY) in conjunction with the state