This phenomenal site from the Brooklyn Historical Society traces the early history of this American city through the narrative of a single family. In 1661, Dutchman Pieter Janse Hagewout immigrated to the burgeoning colonies and purchased land in what came to be known as King's County. Over the decades, his descendants, the Lefferts, amassed land, wealth, and power, transforming the fertile soil...

What's the Brooklyn Historical Society doing these days? One way to find out is via the this excellent blog. Here, the generally curious can find everything from topical maps documenting the expansion of this celebrated borough to musings on neighborhood change from Park Slope to Red Hook. The Photo of the Week feature is a great place to start as it contains a weekly selection culled from their...

Brooklyn is the most populated borough in New York City, but it wasn’t always so. Settled by a mix of Dutch and English colonists in the mid 1600s, what we now call Brooklyn was once divided into six independent towns. Gradually, the towns merged to form the city of Brooklyn, which was the third largest city in the United States until it became a borough of the Greater City of New York in 1898. To...