Slavery in colonial New York City

Abstract

Manhattan's landscape contains few material reminders of its colonial past. Traces of the Native Americans who frequented the island, the Dutch who planted New Amsterdam at its tip and the various European and African peoples who populated the city renamed New York by the English in 1664 are few and far between. Though the obliteration of the tangible remains of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century city dwellers speeded the transformation of Manhattan into a vibrant twentieth-century metropolis, the dearth of visible signs of this era has complicated historians' efforts to fabricate enduring images of the men and women of this early urban society. Their stories, though dutifully rehearsed by schoolbook writers and museum curators, have rarely become etched in memory.