New York State History

From Niagara to New York City

Category

Upstate New York

The state beyond the city. New York runs 300 miles west of the Bronx and most of its history happened out there: the canal that made the port rich, the falls that lit Buffalo, the river that carried the Dutch inland, and the battlefield where the Revolution turned.

6 articles

Print of the surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga in October 1777
Upstate New York

Saratoga 1777

Two battles on the Hudson in the autumn of 1777, the surrender of a British army, and the alliance that …

Photograph of the Adirondack Mountains taken in 1893
Upstate New York

The Adirondacks and Forever Wild

Six million acres, a constitutional clause protecting them, and the only park of its kind in the United …

Bird's eye lithograph of Albany, New York, in 1879, the Hudson river in the foreground
Upstate New York

Albany and the Capital

Fort Orange, the Dongan Charter, the Albany Plan of Union, and why the seat of government is 140 miles from …

Thomas Cole's 1837 painting In the Catskills, a wooded valley under a wide sky
Upstate New York

The Hudson Valley

The tidal river that carried the Dutch inland, gave American painting its first school, and produced a …

Frederic Edwin Church's 1857 painting of Niagara Falls, seen from the Canadian shore
Upstate New York

Niagara Falls

How a waterfall on the Canadian border became a tourist trade, an industrial power source, and the first …

The Erie Canal aqueduct carrying the waterway over the Genesee river at Rochester, 19th century engraving
Upstate New York

The Erie Canal

The 363-mile ditch that made New York the Empire State, dug between 1817 and 1825 from Albany to Buffalo.