New York State Regents Examination U.S. History and Government

During the war for independence, British forces held New York City for most of the fighting. The harbor let them land troops and supplies. Inside the city, many residents stayed loyal to the British crown. Elsewhere in the state, other New Yorkers took up arms against that rule.

The Hudson River worked like a military road made of water. British leaders hoped to seize the river valley and cut New England off from the colonies to the south. In 1777, American forces stopped that plan at Saratoga, north of Albany. The victory kept New England attached by land to the rest of the fight.

News of Saratoga helped convince France to enter the war as an ally of the Americans. France sent ships, soldiers, and money. That help changed the strength of the American side. A battle north of Albany thus reached a court in Europe.

When the fighting ended, New York had to repair towns that armies had used as camps and roads. New York City remained a major port. The Hudson remained the main route from that port into the interior.

Delegates meeting in Poughkeepsie spent the summer of 1788 arguing about a new national plan of government. Supporters said New York needed a stronger union if it was going to pay its debts and keep trade moving. Opponents feared that a distant government would swallow the power of towns and of the state.

On July 26, 1788, New York approved the plan and became the 11th state. Ten states had already approved it. New York's approval made eleven. The argument in Poughkeepsie was about joining that union.

The capital is Albany. Albany stands on the Hudson, upriver from the sea. New York City is a large port in the same state. Lawmakers of the state meet in Albany. The port and the capital are two different places.

Joining the union did not erase town government. Towns and counties kept their own officers. The plan New York approved gave the national government power to tax, to raise an army, and to regulate trade among the states.

A clerk in Albany wrote a notice for people waiting in the courthouse hallway. The notice was the clerk's own wording, posted on the wall. It said that people may speak their views, publish those views, and worship as they choose. The clerk added that the notice did not pretend those freedoms had no limit when one person's act harmed another, and that a person who was unsure could ask the court.

A second sheet, pinned beside the notice, described the national government as three groups. One group writes the laws. A second group carries the laws out. A third group hears disputes about the laws. The law-writing group can refuse a proposal. The group that carries laws out can send a bill back unsigned. The group that hears disputes can set aside a law that breaks the national plan.

A third sheet split the work. Coining money and dealing with foreign countries were national jobs. Running town schools and keeping local roads were state and local jobs. The sheet listed Albany's town roads as a local job, not as a matter for a treaty with a foreign country.

In 1789 the new national government gathered for a time in New York City, the port at the mouth of the Hudson. George Washington took the oath of office there on April 30, 1789. The city was a meeting place for that national beginning. The capital of New York State is Albany.

Alexander Hamilton of New York became the first secretary of the treasury. He asked Congress to take on the debts of the earlier national government and of the states, to place a tax on some imported goods, and to charter a national bank. He argued that a shared debt and a reliable currency would bind the states together.

Farmers in the Hudson Valley were not all persuaded. Some said a national bank would favor merchants in the port city over people who sold grain upriver. Congress still accepted the main pieces of the plan. The debts were taken on, and a national bank was chartered.

The national meeting place later moved south, away from New York City. That move did not decide the state capital. The capital of New York State is Albany, where the state's lawmakers meet. The harbor city remains a port.

Before the canal, a barrel of flour from the Great Lakes country reached the port at New York City by rough road and by carries between streams. The trip was slow. The freight charge was high. A farmer far inland had a weak link to buyers in the harbor.

The Erie Canal opened in 1825 and linked the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Boats could leave the Hudson at Albany, follow the canal west, and reach Buffalo on Lake Erie. From Buffalo, lake boats reached the other Great Lakes. New York paid for the work. DeWitt Clinton had pushed for the ditch while critics called it a waste.

When the canal opened, freight charges between Buffalo and the Hudson fell sharply. Towns along the route, including Syracuse and Rochester, grew as markets. Grain and lumber moved east toward the Hudson and the harbor. Manufactured goods moved west toward the lakes.

The canal did not replace the Hudson. It joined the Hudson to the lakes. Boats could pass from the lakes to Buffalo, across the canal to Albany, and down the Hudson to the port. The year of that opening was 1825.

In July 1848, women and men met in a chapel in Seneca Falls, a mill town among the Finger Lakes of New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott called the meeting. They were tired of laws that let a husband control his wife's wages and that kept women from voting.

The people at the meeting wrote their own list of complaints and demands. They asked that women be able to speak in public, keep their own earnings, attend college, and vote. They read the list in the chapel. Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery and who published a newspaper, spoke in favor of keeping the vote on the list.

Some visitors wanted the vote taken off. They said a demand that large would make the other demands easy to mock. Stanton kept the vote on the list. The meeting did not rewrite New York law during that week. It did begin an organized campaign that traveled to other towns.

Susan B. Anthony of Rochester later joined Stanton in petition drives aimed at the legislature in Albany. The petitions asked lawmakers to change the rules on property and on voting. In 1848 the national ballot for women was still many years away.

New York was a free state when the Civil War began in 1861. Slavery continued in the Southern states that left the Union. New York sent a large number of soldiers to the Union army. Regiments left from Albany, from Buffalo, and from New York City. The state stayed with the Union.

In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln announced that enslaved people in states still fighting the Union would be freed. The announcement did not, on the day it was issued, rewrite every state law in the country. It made ending slavery a stated aim of the Union war, and it opened the way for Black men to join the Union army in larger numbers.

That same year a draft to fill the army set off days of violence in New York City. Part of the anger targeted a rule that let a man pay a fee and avoid service. Crowds also attacked Black residents of the city. Troops had to restore order. The violence did not move New York off the Union side.

After the war, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery throughout the United States. New York had already been a free state. The amendment made the end of slavery a national rule, including in the states that had seceded.

After the war, three amendments were added to the national plan. The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment treated people born in the United States as citizens and told each state not to push a person outside the protection of the law. The Fifteenth Amendment told the states they could not shut a voter out of the ballot because of race.

Before that voting rule, New York had required Black men to meet a property test that white men did not face. The national change barred a racial barrier to the vote. A voter in Buffalo and a voter in a Southern town were supposed to stand under the same ban.

The promise was uneven. Some states wrote reading tests and charged fees, then applied them one way to Black citizens and another way to white citizens. Courts and later statutes had to deal with those barriers. The amendments did not walk every citizen into a polling place.

A family that moved from the South to New York City might find wages on the docks and still meet a landlord who refused tenants because of race. The national rules had changed. Not every local habit changed in the same year.

Beginning in 1892, many immigrants who reached New York City passed through a station on Ellis Island in the harbor. Inspectors looked at papers and at health. Most people were admitted. Some were held and sent back. The island was a gate. It was not a neighborhood where a family settled.

People who stayed often found work in garment shops, on the docks, or in the building trades. On the Lower East Side, families packed into tenement rooms with little light and a shared sink. Mutual aid societies helped a newcomer find a job and a burial fund.

Wages in a garment shop were often low, and the day was long. Children sometimes left school to help pay the rent. Reformers in settlement houses wrote reports asking Albany and the city government for safer buildings and shorter hours.

Statutes in the late nineteenth century and afterward shut out or limited people from particular countries. Chinese immigrants faced especially severe limits. A family could see the harbor and still be stopped by a line in the statute book.

In 1911 a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City killed 146 workers, most of them young women. Doors had been locked. The fire escape failed. Grief and anger pushed lawmakers in Albany to pass factory rules on exits, sprinklers, and hours of work.

Writers known as muckrakers published investigations of spoiled food, dishonest medicines, and city corruption. An article could stir readers. It could not, by itself, enact a statute. In that same era the national plan was changed so voters, rather than state legislatures, chose United States senators.

Women in New York had been pressing for the vote since the Seneca Falls meeting. The state granted women the vote in 1917. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment extended women's voting to the whole United States. A woman in Buffalo and a woman in a state that had refused the ballot then stood under the same national rule.

Settlement houses, unions, and the factory laws started as pressure in workplaces and in neighborhood parlors. The statutes were written in Albany or in Congress. Pressure and lawmaking were two steps, not one.

In October 1929 the stock market collapsed. In the years after, banks failed and depositors lost savings. Factories cut hours or shut their doors. By the early 1930s, bread lines formed in New York City and in Buffalo. Upstate farms could not get a price that covered the cost of raising the crop.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had been governor of New York. He became president in 1933. His New Deal used federal money and new agencies against the emergency. One agency insured bank deposits so that a bank failure would not wipe out an ordinary savings account. Another hired workers to build schools, roads, and parks, including public buildings in New York.

In 1935 Congress passed the Social Security Act. It created a pension for many older workers, paid for by a tax on wages and on employers. It also offered help to states for people who were out of work. A retired mill hand in Rochester could receive a federal pension that had not existed in 1929.

Critics said the national government was taking on work that belonged to the states or to private charity. Supporters said a relief office in a city could not meet a collapse this large. The argument outlasted the bread lines.

The United States stayed officially out of the Second World War when the fighting began in Europe in 1939. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. Congress declared war the next day. Germany and Italy, already allied with Japan, were soon at war with the United States as well.

Shipyards in New York City and factories in Buffalo turned to war production. Women took industrial jobs that many employers had reserved for men. Households collected scrap metal and used ration books for sugar, gasoline, and shoes. The harbor moved troops and cargo under blackout rules.

The national government also forced many Japanese Americans on the West Coast into camps. The order treated people as a danger because of ancestry. The order was later condemned, and Congress paid reparations to survivors. Those camps were not on the Hudson, but the injustice was a national act.

After the war, many countries created the United Nations and placed its headquarters in New York City. The city was a meeting place for that body. Albany remained the capital of New York State. A headquarters in the harbor city did not change where the state's lawmakers met.

After 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union led rival camps. They did not fight a direct war on each other's home ground. People called the contest the Cold War. American policy, often named containment, aimed to keep the Soviet camp from expanding.

The Marshall Plan sent American aid to rebuild economies in Western Europe. NATO was a military alliance. An attack on one member was treated as an attack on all. In 1948 and 1949 the Soviet Union blocked land routes into West Berlin. The United States and its allies supplied the city by air.

In 1962 the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy ordered a naval quarantine and demanded that the missiles be removed. After days of extreme tension, the missiles were withdrawn. Weapons on one island had threatened a much wider war.

The contest eased at the end of the 1980s. The Berlin Wall opened in 1989. The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Students in Buffalo who had practiced air-raid drills grew into a world where that particular rivalry was over. Other conflicts did not end with it.

In 1954 the Supreme Court held that public schools separated by race were unconstitutional. The cases came from school systems the law itself had divided. One decision did not integrate every building that year. It rejected the claim that a school kept apart by race could still be called equal.

In 1955 Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, after she refused to give up her seat on a bus the city had segregated. Black residents then refused to ride the buses for more than a year. The boycott showed that a disciplined refusal could pressure a city system. Martin Luther King Jr., a minister in that campaign, became a national leader of nonviolent protest.

In August 1963 a great march filled the center of Washington. Marchers called for jobs and freedom and for an end to laws that sorted people by race. The march was a demonstration. It was not a meeting of Congress. Only lawmakers could write the statutes.

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It barred discrimination in public places and in many jobs. The Voting Rights Act in 1965 banned the tests and devices that had been used to keep Black citizens off the voting rolls. A church group in Harlem, in New York City, and a church group in a Southern county could point to those same national statutes.

Every state sends two United States senators to Washington, whether the state is large or small. New York has two senators. So does a state with far fewer people. A census does not change that Senate number.

House seats work by population. A census every ten years counts the people, and the 435 voting seats in the House are divided from that count. A state that grows faster than the country can gain seats. A state that grows more slowly can lose a seat even when its own population went up.

After the 2020 census, New York has 2 United States senators and 26 United States House seats. The House figure is one seat lower than in the previous decade. The Senate figure stayed at two. A voter in Albany and a voter in Buffalo share those same two senators. Members of the House represent districts drawn inside the state.

After each census, district lines are redrawn so that House districts in a state hold roughly equal numbers of people. Lawsuits and arguments in Albany have fought over how those lines are drawn. The census count is the starting number. This account names offices, not the people who hold them.

A class in Albany pinned a map of New York to the board. The scale printed in the corner said that 1 inch on this classroom map equals 50 miles. The teacher told the class to use the printed scale and not to guess from the size of the paper.

She laid a ruler on a practice line drawn in the margin, not along a highway. The line measured 3 inches. At the printed scale, 3 inches is 150 miles, because 3 times 50 is 150. She said the line was an exercise in reading the scale. It was not a claim about the driving distance between two cities.

The class tried other lengths with the same rule. A mark of 1 inch stands for 50 miles. A mark of 2 inches stands for 100 miles. A mark of 4 inches stands for 200 miles. They wrote the rule under the map: multiply the number of inches by 50.

The map still showed real directions. The Hudson runs from north to south, toward the harbor at New York City. Buffalo sits at the western end of the state, on Lake Erie. Albany sits inland, on the Hudson. The scale turns inches into miles. It does not move those places.

A class in Albany made a chart of three layers of government. The city looks after local streets, parks, and the police patrol on those streets. The state, meeting in Albany, writes the state budget, sets many rules for schools, and runs elections for state offices. The national government in Washington coins money, makes treaties, and keeps the armed forces.

The chart also showed how the national groups limit one another. A president may refuse to sign a bill. Congress may pass that bill again if the vote is large enough. The Supreme Court may decide that a law conflicts with the national plan of government. No single group does every job.

New York cannot print a national currency of its own. Washington does not plow side streets in Albany after a storm, and it does not plow the lake-effect snow that piles up in Buffalo. The state can set a speed limit on a state road beside the Hudson. The national government can regulate trade that crosses state lines and goods that enter the port of New York City from abroad.

On one ballot, residents vote for a House member from a district, two senators for the whole state, a governor who serves in Albany, and local officers. The chart named the jobs. It did not name the people in those jobs.