Welcome to the deep dive. You know, if you stood
in New York Harbor in the year 1524, you wouldn't
be looking at this empty, silent wilderness just
waiting to be discovered. Right. Not at all.
Yeah. According to the explorer Giovanni de Verrazano,
you'd be looking at a vast sheet of water that
was absolutely swarming with a highly organized
fleet of native boats. I mean, New York didn't
start with skyscrapers. It started as an ancient,
thriving empire. That is just such a crucial
image to hold in your mind. We often assume the
story of a major state begins with a clean slate.
You know, like the very first brick led by a
European settler. Like history just magically
starts right there. Exactly. But to truly understand
New York, you have to realize that those towering
modern skylines, they're just the newest layer
on top of retreating glaciers, deep natural harbors
and, well, incredibly sophisticated indigenous
trade routes. Which brings us to our mission
for this deep dive. Today, we are pulling from
a really comprehensive historical text, specifically
the Wikipedia article detailing the history of
New York state. And we are covering an immense
timeline here. Oh, yeah, massive. We're stretching
all the way from 10 ,000 BC right up to the 21st
century. We want to uncover the why behind New
York's enduring dominance. You know, how did
its specific geography and the relentless churn
of its people transform it from an ancient indigenous
hub into a global epicenter of commerce and culture?
Okay, let's unpack this. Where do we actually
begin if we aren't starting with the Dutch? Well,
we begin long before the concrete. Around 10
,000 BC, the first peoples arrived in the region
following the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers.
And if we just jump forward to around 1100 AD,
two distinct native cultures had really established
dominance, which were the Algonquian and the
Iroquoian peoples. See, I always pictured early
native settlements as like small scattered bands
of foragers just kind of surviving. Sure. That's
the common misconception. Right. But the source
text paints a totally different picture. It sounds
like they had a highly complex established economy.
Absolutely did. I mean, this wasn't just basic
survival. It was agricultural engineering. By
the time European explorers actually arrived,
the Mohawk people, for example, were cultivating
these sprawling maize fields in the fertile lowlands
of the Mohawk River. Wow. Yeah. And out west,
the Iroquois managed extensive orchards in well
-cultivated lands. They were actively reshaping
the environment to support large populations.
And politically, they were just as advanced.
I look at the five nations of the Iroquois League
that formed by the 15th century and it almost
sounds like an early version of the European
Union. Oh, that's a really interesting way to
put it. Yeah, because they were this highly organized
network, you know, coordinating diplomacy, war,
and trade across this immense region, stretching
from New York all the way to the Great Lakes.
What's fascinating here is how that pre -existing
network dictated the terms of early colonialism.
Early colonial New York was not a blank canvas
at all. It was a highly complex, three -way power
dynamic. It was the fur trade, right? Exactly.
The Iroquois League controlled that massive territory,
which meant they essentially monopolized the
incredibly lucrative fur trade. So when the Europeans
arrived, they didn't build a trade hub from scratch.
They basically just plugged into a system that
was already humming. Precisely. I mean, the Iroquois
actively bargained with the Dutch, who had set
up Fort Nassau in New Amsterdam in the early
1600s, and later they bargained with the British.
They were playing them against each other. Oh,
absolutely. The Native Americans had incredible
leverage because they controlled the inland waterways.
If you wanted beaver pelts, which were basically
the currency of the era, you had to deal with
them. Man, it always comes back to geography.
Those deep natural harbors on the coast and the
river systems reaching deep into the interior.
That's what made New York the ultimate geographic
prize. It really did. It doesn't be a prize that
inevitably turned you into a battleground. Always.
You mentioned the Dutch setting up New Netherland.
Well, by 1664, the British sail in to take it
over and they rename it New York after the Duke
of York. And they conquered it pretty easily,
right? Like it wasn't a massive war. Well, conquer
might be a strong word. The Dutch essentially
surrendered without a single shot fired. Wait,
really? No shots? Not one! Their internal politics
were already fracturing, and they simply didn't
have the military backing to hold off an entire
British fleet. So they just handed it over. Wow.
So under the British, the economy just explodes.
I read about these enormous estates along the
Hudson River, like these massive manors owned
by families like the Livingstons and Cortlands.
Yes, the Patroonships. Right. Plus you have thousands
of German immigrants moving upstate to farm.
Yeah, the Palatine Germans. What's happening
here is the creation of a true agricultural powerhouse.
Those Hudson Valley farms and the agriculture
out on Long Island, they essentially turned New
York into a sprawling bread basket and lumber
yard. But where was all that food going? Was
it going back to England? Actually, no. A huge
portion of it was feeding and supplying the British
sugar colonies down in the Caribbean. Oh, interesting.
Yeah. The Caribbean islands were so focused on
growing high value cash crops like sugar that
they relied on places like New York. for their
basic food and timber. It was a massive trade
network. But all that agricultural wealth and
strategic location, I mean, that put a huge target
on New York's back when the American colonies
finally decided to break away. Oh, a massive
target. During the American Revolution, New York
was the linchpin. The British knew it. They parked
an armada off Staten Island in 1776. That must
have just darkened the entire harbor. It was
the largest fleet of the century. We're talking
30 ,000 sailors and soldiers. That is terrifying.
It was. They drove General George Washington
completely out of the New York City area and
held the city as their North American base of
operations for the rest of the entire war. Which
brings up a strategic question. The British plan
was to use New York to crush the rebellion by
cutting the colonies in half. If American General
Horatio Gates hadn't won the Battle of Saratoga
in upstate New York in 1777, wouldn't the British
have controlled that entire Hudson Champlain
corridor and literally chopped the colonies in
half? If we connect this to the bigger picture,
surviving that exact existential threat at Saratoga
is what turned the tide of the entire Revolutionary
War. Because it kept them connected. Yes. If
the British had held that river corridor, they
would have physically isolated rebellious New
England from the rest of the colonies, basically
starving the Revolution. Waning at Saratoga proved
to the world that the Americans could actually
fight a conventional war. Which officially convinced
France. to ally with them. Exactly. That French
support was crucial. And internally, surviving
that threat gave New York the breathing room
to draft its own state constitution in 1777,
right? A document that ended up heavily influencing
the actual United States Constitution a decade
later. Yes, New York's legal framework was incredibly
influential. And because New York was so pivotal,
New York City actually served as the national
capital on and off between 1785 and 1790. Oh,
right. It wasn't always DC. Far from it. New
York is where George Washington was inaugurated,
and it's where the Bill of Rights was drafted.
OK, so surviving the war and securing the territory,
that was step one. But now they have this massive
geographic problem. Right. They have this wealthy
port on the ocean and a resource -rich interior,
but there is a giant mountain range right in
between them. How do they bridge that? This sparks
the transportation revolution of the 19th century.
In 1807, you have Robert Fulton launching the
first successful steamboat line from New York
City up to Albany. Which is huge. It is. But
the real game changer, the engineering marvel
that alters global economics forever, happens
in 1825. The Erie Canal. Here's where it gets
really interesting. I feel like you can almost
compare the opening of the Erie Canal to the
invention of the internet. Oh, I like that. How
do you see the connection there? Well, think
about it. Before the internet, sharing information
globally was slow and expensive. You were limited
by physical mail or, like, really expensive phone
lines. Here. Before the canal, if you wanted
to move heavy goods from the interior of America
to the Atlantic Ocean, you had to haul it over
the Appalachian Mountains on wagons. It was brutally
hard and totally cost prohibitive. Yeah, it just
didn't make economic sense. But suddenly, this
man -made waterway connects the Great Lakes directly
to the Hudson River. It's this instant sprawling
network that completely changes who has access
to the global market. That's a perfect analogy.
The mechanism of the canal, you know, using a
system of locks to raise and lower boats over
the elevation changes, it dropped the cost of
shipping goods by an estimated 95%. 95%. That
is absurd. The economic impact was immediate.
Towns along the route, like Buffalo and Rochester,
they transformed into major boom towns almost
overnight. Western New York went from being the
rugged frontier to a heavily settled, incredibly
prosperous region. And it established New York
City as the unquestioned economic kingpin of
the nation because all those agricultural products
from the interior were flowing right through
its port. They will. But that immense wealth
and connectivity, it created a deep cultural
fracture within the state itself. Right, you
get this stark geographic split. Western New
York, which is booming with all these New England
migrants traveling the canal, it becomes a hotbed
for progressive causes. Yes, a totally different
mindset from the city. Exactly. It becomes the
center for the abolitionist movement, early women's
rights conventions, and a vital stop on the Underground
Railroad. While at the exact same time, downstate...
specifically the mercantile elite in New York
City, they were deeply financially tied to the
Deep South. Half of New York City's exports before
the Civil War were related to Southern cotton.
Half. I mean, that is a staggering reliance.
No wonder they were conflicted. I read that when
the Civil War broke out, the mayor of New York
City actually proposed that the city secedes
from the union because a war would devastate
their Southern business interests. It's true.
He did propose that, though once the war formally
began, the state largely rallied. New York ultimately
provided more soldiers and more funding to the
Union cause than any other northern state. But
those internal contradictions, they were still
boiling right under the surface, which led to
one of the darkest, most complex moments in the
city's history, which is the 1863 draft riots.
Walk me through how that actually unfolded. To
understand the draft riots, you really have to
look at the severe social and economic tensions
of the era. The federal government instituted
a military draft to replenish troops, but the
law had this glaring loophole. If you could afford
to pay a commutation fee of $300, you were entirely
exempt from serving. $300 in 1863. That's not
a loophole. That's a VIP pass for the rich. A
working class laborer would have to work for
a year to see that kind of money. Exactly. It
caused intense, visceral resentment among the
working class, which in New York City was heavily
dominated by ethnic Irish immigrants. They felt
they were being sent to slaughter while the wealthy
just sat comfortably at home. racial tensions
too, right? Yes. On top of the class issues,
certain political leaders had been stoking racial
fears, convincing these immigrants that freed
southern slaves would migrate north and compete
for their very same low wage jobs. So it was
just a total powder keg of class warfare and
racial anxiety. Yes. And when the draft lottery
began in July of 1863, it ignited five days of
sheer chaos. The rioters violently targeted black
citizens, burned down their neighborhoods, and
attacked known abolitionists. That is just awful.
It was horrific. It actually required federal
troops, some marching straight from the Battle
of Gettysburg, to finally quell the violence.
It's a tragic piece of history, but it perfectly
illustrates how the wealth generated by those
commercial arteries wasn't shared equally at
all. Not even close. But coming out of the Civil
War, New York channels its capital and manpower
into an industrial explosion. Yeah, the post
-Civil War era saw New York completely dominate
manufacturing. And this is where we see companies
like Eastman Kodak springing up in Rochester
and General Electric and Schenectady. Why did
they build there specifically? They were leveraging
the infrastructure that was already in place.
The Erie Canal corridor provided ready access
to shipping, and the rivers provided water power
for early manufacturing. Ah, that makes sense.
Simultaneously, the state remained an agricultural
titan. The Mohawk Valley became famous for its
cheese industry, and the area around New York
Harbor was literally the oyster capital of the
world. But to run all those sprawling factories,
you need a workforce. I know immigration was
a huge factor, but what kind of scale are we
actually talking about here? It's almost hard
to wrap your head around. Between 1855 and 1890
alone, an estimated eight million immigrants
came through Castle Clinton at Battery Park.
Eight million. Yes. And then Ellis Island opened
in 1892, processing millions more over the coming
decades. Greeted by the Statue of Liberty. the
mother of exiles. But managing that explosive
population growth wasn't pretty. It led to the
rise of political machines, most famously Tammany
Hall. How did a machine like Tammany actually
maintain that much control over millions of people?
Well, it was a totally transactional system.
When new immigrants arrived, bewildered and often
destitute, Tammany Hall ward bosses were right
there at the docks. Just waiting for them. Yep.
They provided buckets of coal in the winter,
they helped find housing, and they secured jobs
in city construction. In exchange, the immigrants
provided the one thing Tammany needed, which
was votes. They maintained power by weaponizing
the basic needs of the poor. I found a really
fascinating contradiction in the sources regarding
Tammany Hall and the progressive movement. Oh
yeah. Yes, the progressives, led by figures like
Theodore Roosevelt, were fighting tooth and nail
against these corrupt machines. You'd assume
Tammany Hall would oppose everything the progressives
wanted, including the push for women's suffrage.
And they did, initially. Tammany leaders feared
that adding women to the voter rolls would dilute
their tight control over the male voters they
already had in their pockets. Right. But when
the 1917 New York State referendum on women's
suffrage actually happened, Tammany Hall took
a neutral stance. Do you know why? Why the sudden
shift? Because the wives and daughters of their
own machine leaders were actively pushing for
the right to vote. Oh, wow. Yeah, the ward bosses
couldn't stop the movement inside their own homes,
so they had to back off. That neutral stance
was a crucial reason the referendum actually
passed in New York. This raises an important
question about how New York operates. The state
has always had to balance raw capitalist and
political power with the sheer humanity and demands
of the people actually living there. Speaking
of raw capitalism, we have all these millions
of people, all this industry, and all this immense
wealth consolidating New York City after World
War I. But Manhattan is just a tiny island. Where
do they all go? They go up. This is the birth
of the iconic skyscraper boom during the Roaring
Twenties. Finally we get to the concrete. Exactly.
physical space intersecting with an unprecedented
concentration of post -war capital. Corporations
wanted the prestige of a Manhattan headquarters
and the only way to build was skyward. This era
gave us architectural marvels like the Woolworth
building, the Chrysler building, and eventually
the Empire State Building in 1931. The skyline
became a physical manifestation of New York's
economic dominance. But that roaring economy
crashes hard during the Great Depression. I read
the state faced upwards of 25 percent unemployment.
It was devastating. But again, we see the state
adapting. New York's response, spearheaded by
Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created the
first comprehensive work relief programs in the
nation, programs he later expanded into the New
Deal when he became president. And then World
War II pulls the country out of the Depression,
and New York's industrial capacity just peaks.
The state produced 11 % of all United States
military armaments. Which is an incredible output
for one state. Absolutely. But what happens to
the people when the soldiers come home? Well...
The GI Bill gave returning veterans the opportunity
for higher education, but the private universities
in New York simply couldn't handle the influx
of hundreds of thousands of students. Right.
They were overflowing. Exactly. So the state
was literally forced to create the State University
of New York System, SUNY, in 1948 just to accommodate
the volume. It's a perfect example of the state
rapidly engineering a solution to serve a demographic
explosion. But that post -war era marks a turning
point. the peak industrial output ends, triggering
another monumental shift. Yeah, things change
fast. I feel like it's less of a shift and more
like a computer getting a software update. Oh,
right, like shedding the physical hardware and
rewriting the operating system. Exactly. The
state essentially had to shed its old manufacturing
hardware, you know, the physical factories that
were closing down or moving south and west, chasing
cheaper labor. Right. It had to rewrite its code
to run almost entirely on high -tech financial
and cultural services. The transition was turbulent,
though. The post -war era brought intense decentralization.
The growing middle class bought cars and fled
the cities for the suburbs, creating sprawling
developments like Levittown on Long Island. Oh,
the suburbs. Boom. Yeah. And to connect this
new car -centric culture, the state built the
New York State Thruway, which upstate Democrats
mockingly called Dewey's ditch at the time. Dewey's
ditch, that's harsh. Meanwhile, the cities themselves
hollowed out. By the 1970s, New York City was
teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, dealing
with crime and decaying infrastructure. Upstate
cities like Buffalo saw their populations just
plummet as the steel mills and factories went
quiet. It was a very dark period, yet out of
that urban decay came a cultural and service
industry renaissance. It's incredible. You have
the birth of hip hop and rap music emerging directly
from the struggling neighborhoods of the Bronx.
New York City reclaims its title as a global
media capital, hosting major national news networks
and publishing houses. And Wall Street experiences
a boom. pioneering new financial mechanisms like
junk bond trading. Finance basically became the
new factory floor. We do have to acknowledge
though that this software update had uneven results.
Well, while New York City adapted and thrived
in the information economy, much of upstate did
not. The high tech and finance industries didn't
replace the lost manufacturing jobs in rural
areas, and traditional farming continued a steep
decline. That's a great point. And entering the
21st century, the state's resilience was tested
not just by economics, but by devastating physical
tragedies. Yes. The September 11th attacks in
2001 killed nearly 3 ,000 people, bringing down
the World Trade Center towers. The response to
that was a profound testament to the state's
spirit. Thousands of citizens volunteered in
the agonizing recovery effort. It was an incredible
coming together. It really was. And over the
next decade, the city slowly rebuilt that shattered
acreage, culminating in the opening of One World
Trade Center in 2014. But the hits from the physical
world just kept coming. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy
ravaged the state's coastlines. We're talking
about record high storm surges that flooded the
subway systems in New York City, plunged millions
into darkness, and decimated neighborhoods out
on Long Island. Which brings us back to the core
mechanism of New York's history, adaptation.
New York's story proves that adaptation is the
only way to survive. This is a state that transitioned
from a Native Confederacy trading beaver pelts
to Wall Street brokers trading junk bonds. It
went from hauling agricultural goods on a hand
dug canal to broadcasting global media through
fiber optic cables. So what does this all mean?
From the ancient Iroquois trade networks to the
modern steel and glass metropolis, New York has
never been static. It isn't a museum. It is entirely
defined by the relentless, sometimes chaotic
churn of different people, ideas and industries
colliding. It really makes you look at the place
you live differently. I'd encourage you, listening
to this, to think about what historical forces
are currently shaping your own hometown. You
know, what layers are hiding just beneath the
pavement where you walk. What stands out to you
about how New York has continuously evolved?
I want to leave you with one final thought to
mull over building on the devastation of Hurricane
Sandy, the very geography that birthed New York's
immense prosperity. You know, the deep natural
harbor, the Hudson River, its immediate proximity
to the Atlantic Ocean. That same geography is
now due to rising sea levels becoming its greatest
existential threat. It's ironic. It is. The state
is currently having to engineer massive seawalls
and coastal barriers just to survive the water
that made it rich in the first place. How will
the Empire State adapt to this one? Can you really
build a wall against the ocean, or will New York
have to completely reinvent its relationship
with the water all over again? Just remember,
underneath all that concrete, the glaciers and
the rivers are still there. They always have
been. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.