What was the original name of New York?

Before New York was New York, it was a small island inhabited by a tribe of the Lenape peoples. One early English rendering of the native placename was Manna–hata, speculated to mean “the place where we get wood to make bows”—and hence the borough of Manhattan.

In the early 1600s, the Dutch East India Company sent an Englishman, Henry Hudson, on an expedition for the Northwest Passage. In what’s modern-day Manhattan, Hudson found an island and river (which became his namesake, the Hudson), exploited for trapping beaver and trading their furs.

To establish the Dutch footprint in the New World, they planted a trading post on the southern tip of the island and called it New Amsterdam, after their capital city in the Netherlands.

New Amsterdam was established in 1625. The settlement reached from the southern tip of Manhattan to what today is Wall Street, generally believed to take its name from the wooden boundary the Dutch built to keep out Native Americans, from whom they took the land.

In 1664, England sent four warships to New Amsterdam to fight for the land. The direct general of the Dutch holdings in region, Peter Stuyvesant, surrendered without bloodshed.

King Charles II granted the territory to his brother, James Stuart, Duke of York (and later king himself). The Duke of York is a noble title based on York, an important historic city in northern England. New York state was also named for him.