New Amsterdam (Dutch: Nieuw-Amsterdam) was a 17th-century Dutch colonial settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan Island that served as capital city of New Netherland. It was renamed New York in 1667 in honor of the Duke of York (later James II of England) when English forces seized control of Manhattan along with the rest of the Dutch colony.
The settlement, outside of Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in the New Netherland territory (1614–1664), was situated between 38 and 42 degrees latitude and was a provincial extension of the Dutch Republic as of 1624. Situated on the strategic, fortifiable southern tip of the island of Manhattan, the fort was meant to defend the Dutch West India Company's fur trade operations in the North River (Hudson River). Fort Amsterdam was designated the capital of the province in 1625.
The 1625 date of the founding of New Amsterdam is now commemorated in the official Seal of New York City. (Formerly, the year on the seal was 1664, the year of the provisional Articles of Transfer, ensuring New Netherlanders that they "shall keep and enjoy the liberty of their consciences in religion", negotiated with the English by Pieter Stuyvesant and his council).
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Read more about New Amsterdam: Maps of New Amsterdam, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the word amsterdam:
“The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.”
—Oscar Solomon Straus (1850–1926)