New York City

New York (Lenape: Manaháhtaan, lit. "the place where wood is gathered to make bows"), often called New York City (NYC) to distinguish it from the State of New York, is the most populous city in the United States of America. The city is a center for worldwide banking and finance, and is typically regarded as the headquarters for the U.S. financial industry, metonymically known as Wall Street.

As of 2022, New York City was home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world at 107. Media mogul turned politician Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg, is the wealthiest individual in New York City, with a net worth of more than $82 billion. He was also mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, and was a candidate for the 2020 Democratic nomination for President of the United States.

The original World Trade Center (WTC) was a large complex of seven buildings, including the Twin Towers, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks.

The Stonewall uprising was a series of spontaneous protests by members of the LGBT+ community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. The rebellion erupted after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn.

Indigenous history

Before European colonization, the land that became New York City was inhabited by the Munsee people, a subtribe of the Lenape people whose territory (Lenapehoking) stretched across the Lower Hudson region to Delaware Bay, including parts of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

During the seventeenth century, Dutch colonists established trading posts and settlements throughout the Delaware River valley, acquiring land from the Lenape through purchase agreements that were frequently based on coercion or differing understandings of land ownership, while competing with Swedish and later English settlers for control of the region. Continued European expansion and settlement gradually displaced the Lenape from much of their ancestral territory, a process that accelerated under English rule through agreements such as the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737.

Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lenape communities were progressively displaced westward by British colonial expansion and later U.S. expansion. Following the Battle of Fallen Timbers, many Lenape were resettled in Indiana, then dispersed to Kansas, before most were relocated to present-day Oklahoma in 1866. Other Lenape communities are today located in Wisconsin and Ontario.

Labor Movement and Class Struggle

In the early twentieth century, New York City's garment industry relied heavily on the labor of Jewish and Italian immigrant women, many of whom worked long hours for low wages in overcrowded and unsafe factories. In response to these conditions, workers organized a series of early strikes and unionization efforts. The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) played a central role in the 1909-1910 Uprising of the 20,000, a strike of mostly female shirtwaist makers in New York City notable for its size, duration, and support from middle-class women. Together with the 1910 Great Revolt, the strike contributed to major workplace reforms and strengthened the union's influence within the garment industry.

Homelessness

The number of homeless people murdered in New York City rose by 300% from 2018 to 2021.

In 2022, following the end of the COVID eviction moratorium, landlords evicted over 100,000 families while keeping many available homes empty. In December 2022, 68,884 people, including 21,805 children, had to sleep in homeless shelters. 58% of people in New York's homeless shelters are Black and 31% are Latino. During his reign, Mayor Eric Adams funded the police to attack homeless people and cut the budget of the Department of Homeless Services by 20%.