Education

The primary education of upper class children in colonial days included reading, writing, simple math, poems, and prayers. Paper and textbooks were scarce so boys and girls recited their lesssons until they memorized them. The three most commonly used books were the Bible, a primer, and a hornbook. As children grew older their schooling prepared them for their eventual roles in plantation life. While boys studied more advanced, academic subjects, the girls learned to assume the duties of the mistress of a plantation.

Native Americans

The Native Americans called themselves the Lenni-lenapes , which means "original people". They lived on a land that provided them with everything that needed to help them live. In the forest they hunted for deer, squirrels, foxes, raccoon, mink, and bears for meat and furs. The women of the tribe prepared and cooked the food. In the spring, they traveled to the seashore, where they enjoyed the plentiful fish and shellfish. On their journeys, they created many trails that were later made into roads by European settlers.

Economy

The central economic commerce was the Dutch and Indian fur trade through Fort Orange, now Albany. After the English takeover in 1664, the Dutch traders in Albany continued to dominate the inland northern fur trade, expanding to a provincial trading post at Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario in 1727. Foodstuffs, especially grain, became the major exports for the remainder of the colonial period. A landlord-tenant existence developed, taking the lead from the Dutch patroons' land grants. Continuing the grants of land under the English, farms dominated the lower Hudson River valley, where powerful families controlled great land tracts of manorial estates. In the 1760s, New Englanders encroached into the area, and land riots against the owners of Hudson Valley manors were suppressed by British troops.

African Americans

The diverse colony was almost 50 percent Dutch but also included English, various European nationalities, African slaves, and freedmen. By the mid-eighteenth century, New York held the highest slave population of all the northern colonies, at 7 to 10 percent of the population.

Religion

With the religious toleration after the changeover to English rule, the predominant Dutch Reformed Church split into New York City's sophisticated and wealthy orthodox and rural Pietistic wings. By 1750, the Reformed churches were still in the majority, but Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, Congregational, and Baptist denominations also existed. The city also had one Roman Catholic church and one Jewish synagogue.

Government

New York was conceived as a proprietary colony and named after James, Duke of York, its initial proprietor. When the Duke succeeded to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland as James II (and VII), in 1685, New York became a Crown Colony. In principle, the form of government was absolute rule by the Duke of York, or later the King. In practice, the Duke of York delegated his authority to a provincial governor whom he had appointed and instructed, and a provincial legislature elected by freeholders.
When the Duke of York succeeded to the throne, he disallowed the charter he had previously granted to the colony and melded it with the super-colony he called the Dominion of New England. This policy was unpopular in New York, as elsewhere. Jacob Leisler led a short-lived rebellion against the Dominion of New England. When William of Orange and his wife Mary, eldest daughter of James II, succeeded to the throne in the Glorious Revolution, they restored New York's charter and elected assembly.
In the decades following the Glorious Revolution, New York's royal governors often found themselves torn between the Crown's instructions and the political pressures exerted by the colony's elected assembly. Since the assembly held the purse strings, most royal governors chose to negotiate with it.
In the 1730s, New York City was the setting for the Zenger case, in which a young printer, John Peter Zenger was accused of libelling Governor Sir William Cosby. The Zenger case established the precedent that if an allegation is true, it cannot be libel, although it was decades before this principle was consistently applied in American courts.
Although colonial New York had a reputation for political conservatism, it suggested the first intercolonial congress, the Albany Congress of 1754. New York also hosted the meeting, where delegates from seven colonies discussed measures to defend themselves from the French and improve colonists' relations with the Iroquois Confederacy.

Clothing

In colonial times there were all types of clothes. Women spun, sewed or knitted other people’s clothing. Women wore aprons and dresses. Men wore pants, knee socks and fitted jackets called doublets. A baby would wear a pillow around his waist, so that if the baby fell, he or she wouldn’t hurt itself. When kid’s were six years old they didn’t wear baby clothes any more. They wore the same clothes as their parents. Most people didn’t have enough money to buy clothes, so they made their own clothes. In colonial days they wore bright and light colored clothes. They had a lot of clothes in colonial times.