What's New?

This week, Tidbits tells you what’s new by bringing you some interesting facts on a few names and common terms beginning with “new.”

NEW YORK

• In 1609, explorer Henry Hudson, who was funded by the Dutch East India Company, sailed up the North River (now called the Hudson River) to establish Dutch possession of the area that is now New York state. They named it New Netherland, in honor of their Dutch ancestry.

• Dutch official Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manna-hatta from the Lenape Native Americans in 1626. The name in the Lenape language meant “the place where we get wood to make bows,” which the Dutch later changed to Manhattan. They established a settlement dubbed New Amsterdam at the southern tip of the island, which became the New Netherland seat of government.

• When the British conquered the Dutch in 1664, England renamed the New Netherland colony, calling it New York. They also changed New Amsterdam settlement to New York City, after England's Duke of York. Following the Revolutionary War, the New York colony was admitted as the 11th state to the Union on July26, 1788.

• Many of America’s most-visited landmarks are in New York City. Grand Central Terminal is visited by 21 million people every year, while over 40 million visitors tour through Central Park. The most visited location in the entire U.S. is Times Square, with more than 42 million travelers visiting the world-famous landmark each year. Surprisingly, the visitor count at the Statue of Liberty is just 4.25 million.

• When The New York Times was founded in 1851, it sold for a penny per copy. Although the Times has won 130 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper, it has never been the nation’s leader in circulation, currently ranking third behind USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. When the rest of the world's newspapers began adding color on their pages in 1982, The “Times” didn't follow suit until 1993, making them one of the last papers to do so. Now famous for its daily crossword puzzles, the Times didn't begin publishing them until 1942, more than 20 years after other papers worldwide had begun featuring the popular puzzle.

NEW ENGLAND

• The term New England refers to the region of six states in northeastern United States – Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. As English colonists began to migrate to the New World in the early 1600s, English explorer John Smith gave this area the name New England.

• John Smith also named the state of New Hampshire, honoring Hampshire, England, a county in southeast England on the shores of the English Channel. It was also a departure port for several parties of Pilgrims headed to North America during the late 1600s.

• New Hampshire, the ninth state to enter the Union, is home to many of the nation’s firsts, including the first free public library, established in 1833 in Peterborough. In 1719, the first potato planted in the colonies was in New Hampshire soil.

• Notable New Hampshire natives include Levi Hutchins, inventor of the first alarm clock, Luther C. Ladd, the first enlisted soldier to die in the American Civil War, and Sarah J. Hale, the author and journalist who in 1830 penned “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. Christa McAuliffe was a social studies teacher at the high school in Concord, New Hampshire when she was selected as the first teacher in space. She tragically perished in the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. • New Haven, Connecticut was one of America’s first planned cities, with eight streets laid out in a four-by-four grid, back in 1639. The area was originally known as Quinnipiac, but the town was renamed Newhaven in 1640, meaning “a new port.” It’s a city of firsts, with the first steamboat built there in 1787, followed by the invention of the first cotton gin in 1793. New Haven was home to America’s first telephone directory and public telephone booth. And don’t forget the first lollipop, introduced in 1892!

• The New England Patriots weren’t always called by that name. When the team was founded as a charter member of the American Football League in 1959, they were known as the Boston Patriots. The team didn’t have a regular home field for 11 years, moving from the field at Boston University to Harvard Stadium to Fenway Park to Boston College.

• Finally in 1971, following a merger of the NFL and AFL, the team moved to a new stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. This brought a change in the team’s name to the Bay State Patriots. However, it didn’t take long for the NFL to reject the new name, pointing out that the abbreviation for the team would be the B.S. Patriots -- too much of a temptation for sportswriters to disrespect the team in their headlines. In March, 1971, the team officially became the New England Patriots.

NOVA SCOTIA

• The name of the Canadian Atlantic province of Nova Scotia actually translates from the Latin, meaning “New Scotland.” A 1621 Royal Charter granted Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling and a Scottish poet, the right to settle lands in the Maritime islands. However, it was French colonists who established the first permanent settlement in Nova Scotia in 1605. The province’s claim to fame is as the world’s largest exporter of Christmas trees, lobster, and wild berries.

NEW JERSEY

• New Jersey holds the record of the highest population density in the U.S. It’s the fourth-smallest state, but its density is 13 times the national average, with an average ratio of 1,030 people to every square mile. In 1664 when the area was under English rule, King Charles II granted a large area of land that would later become New Jersey to a loyalist friend, Sir George Carteret. The area was named the province of New Jersey, after the largest of England’s Channel Islands, Jersey. Until 1702, the area was divided into two distinct provinces, East Jersey and West Jersey.

• New Jersey has the highest number of millionaires per capita of all U.S. states, with 9.76% of its households within that income category. However, the state also holds the dubious distinction of being the car theft capital of the world!

• Although we might think of New Jersey as a primarily urban area, there are more than 10,000 farms producing more than 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables, earning the state the nickname of The Garden State. It ranks in the Top Ten producers of squash, bell peppers, tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries.

• New Jersey’s firsts include the country’s first baseball game (played in Hoboken in 1846), the first drive-in movie theater (which opened in Camden in 1933), and the world’s first boardwalk, built in Atlantic City in 1870, with a distance of 5.5 miles (8.85 km). □