An Italian explorer, Giovanni da Verrazano, first discovered Manhattan in 1524. He was working for the king of France. He raised the French flag, claimed the land for the French, and founded a small village. One hundred years later, the Dutch defeated the French rivals when they took Manhattan in the early part of the next century. After this victory, the Dutch held the colony until the English took it from them in 1664.

According to one story, it was as a result of the Dutch presence that the city had become known as The Big Apple. The governor of the Dutch colony, Peter Stuyvesant, began planting apple orchards, and, in due course, the state of New York became famous for the quantity of its produce. In the 1920s, jazz musicians began to call the city by this colorful name because it was the biggest and the best thing New York State had to offer.

Even in the 17th century, when there were only a few hundred settlers in the city, 18 different languages were spoken. The first large groups of immigrants after the Dutch and English settlers were the Italians, who began to arrive in the early 1800s. People from all over the Europe followed. The Irish came to the city in their hundreds to escape starvation when the Irish potato crop failed in the 1840s. The greatest numbers came in 1907, when 1,004,756 people poured into the country.

Today, about the fifth of New York's seven million residents were born outside the USA. Among these present-day inhabitants are Italians, Russians, Irish, Greeks, Canadians and Puerto Ricans. About 14,000 of Native Americans from all over the USA live in New York City, and the population is growing all the time. But where now are the people whose ancestors were the city's first inhabitants? Two surviving groups of these early settlers do still have a connection with Manhattan. They are the Delaware, who now live over 2000 km away in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Ontario; and the Ramapough, a community living on the border of New York and New Jersey, direct descendants of Manhattan's original inhabitants.

When the Dutch first settled on the island, groups of Native Americans came every year to settlements in the south and north to hunt, fish and grow crops. But by the 1740s disease, the spread of European settlers and warfare had emptied the island.

However, other Native Americans and New York's most eye-catching modern feature, the skyscraper, are closely linked. As these giants began to rise over Manhattan, the heroic descendants of New York State's Iroquois became famous. They gained a reputation as being extremely skilled steel workers in the construction industry. Without them, New York's most impressive skyscrapers would never have been built and New York would not have had the city skyline it has today.