[MinuteGal]

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks

Leni

[muawiyah]

St. Menehould was one of the folks French explorers and mapmakers liked to name things after (probably because she had 5 sisters who were also venerated so if you needed to name something else nearby you had a handy source of names). The town of St. Menehould is located in the Argonne. The first 6 families to be settled on Manhattan Island were Wallonian ~ that is, from the Argonne. The Wallonians built the wall that became Wall street.

If you go looking for quick references on this you'll find that Henry Hudson is given credit for discovering Manhattan in 1609 - September 12, 1609 to be exact.

The French had already landed just up the coast at St. Sauveur in 1598, and had for most of the preceding century used spots from Norfolk to Boston for drying and salting fish to be shipped back to Europe.

How they missed Manhattan is a doggone good question. Earlier the Portuguese had made a permanent settlement far to the North in Labrador (taken down by the spanish about 1538), and there are another 29 permanent settlements of various quality that were set up BEFORE 1600 on the East Coast ~ and only a couple of them have been studied extensively.

Worth noting ~ by 1620 there were already 20,000 European and African settlers in what is now Maryland ~ and no one has any idea where they came from, or when they settled. Pirates had made earlier settlements up and down the coast throughout the 1500s.

How all these folks missed Manhattan........?

[wardaddy]

Why did Constantinople get the works?

The Muslims changed it after the fall of the Byzantines who had named it Constantinople after Constantine, the first Roman rmporer to convert to Christianity.

I did not look this up so am open to corrections ..just a hunch.

[djf]

It got changed because the British took over from the Dutch.

York is in England. Amsterdam is in Holland.