“Patroon van Volkenberg: A tale of old Manhattan in the year sixteen hundred & ninety-nine” by Henry Thew Stephenson centers around its main character, New York City, specifically the Manhattan borough. Though well before the city's golden age, and even before the Revolutionary War, the book shows what life in New York was like before the USA even existed and what would soon enough become a state of the new country was still a British colony.
