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This book project examines the environmental history of the Greater New York City area in the four centuries since Henry Hudson's 1609 voyage. The goal is to chart changes to land and water while exploring the historical forces that produced those changes. The resulting book will reconceptualize New York's past by highlighting the major ecological turning points in the city's history, especially with respect to water quality and marine life. It will also provide a new understanding of the city's geography. The physical contours of the land changed dramatically over the period under study and so did the meaning of New York itself, evolving from an earlier understanding of the city as made up of the harbor and adjoining lands to a later land-based vision of the area as a simple political entity or a demographically defined metropolitan region. The first half of the book is written. NEH funding will allow me to finish researching and begin writing the rest of the manuscript.