What was New York called before 1664?

New Amsterdam, a Dutch trading post on the tip of Manhattan. The English took it without a shot in 1664 - the governor Peter Stuyvesant wanted to fight and the inhabitants, who mostly cared about trade continuing, declined to back him - and it was renamed for the Duke of York.

The Dutch got it back briefly in 1673 and renamed it New Orange, then traded it away permanently in 1674 in exchange for Suriname, which at the time looked like the better deal - sugar was the most valuable commodity in the world and a cold northern harbour was not.

The Dutch period left more than a name. The city's early tolerance of different religions and languages was a commercial policy inherited from Amsterdam, and it shows in a 1664 report that eighteen languages were spoken there. Words like cookie, stoop and boss are Dutch, as are Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx - and the story that Manhattan was bought for twenty-four dollars of beads comes from one line in one letter, which mentions a value in guilders and says nothing about beads or about what the Lenape understood the transaction to be.