История и геология Катскиллских гор.

The Catskills began existence as a river delta 350 million years ago. Streams flowing off the then mighty Acadian Mountains deposited sediment where the river met a sea (now the Allegheny Plateau). Eventually the Taconics eroded to their present size and the waters dried up, leaving a mostly flat plain. During this time period, a meteor is believed to have struck the area. Panther Mountain is the remains of its crater. Two hundred million years ago, as plate tectonics uplifted the Appalachians, the delta region rose almost uniformly into a plateau rather than breaking up into smaller mountains. Streams that formed over time eroded gaps and valleys, leaving today's "mountains."

The next great change in the Catskill landscape was caused by the most recent of four periods of glaciation, the Wisconsin. Every mountain except Slide (and perhaps West Kill) was covered. The glaciers left behind lakes when they melted, some of which became reservoirs in the 20th century. Some geologists also believe the glaciers scoured off sedimentary layers that may have contained coal, noting the surfeit of coal to the south in Pennsylvania and that the white quartz pebbles found atop Slide Mountain are often an indicator that one has reached the bottom of a coal bed in those regions.

While the matter has yet to be fully researched, there seems to have been no large scale long term Native American presence in the mountains. The local Mohican and Munsee tribes used land and water routes through the mountains to get to the places beyond them, hunted the abundant game and used the mountains in some of their rituals, but in general chose not to live there due to the difficulty of farming the land.

Robert Livingston's son gradually took over managing his interest in the lands he had managed to acquire, and saw their future more in terms of the timber on them than the land itself. Drawing on the family's Scottish roots, he sought to rename them the Lothian Hills and envisioned a grand scheme in which castles named after originals in Scotland would be built on the mountaintops and sold to members of the European nobility who wished to have grand manors. These plans were put on hold in 1769 when John Bradstreet, a British lieutenant colonel who had fought with distinction in the recent French and Indian War filed papers with the crown charging that the Hardenbergh Patent had been improperly granted and could thus be regranted; he claimed a 50,000 acre (200 km2) slice as was his right as a retired officer. Other officers joined in with additional, smaller claims. The colonial governor, John Murray Dunmore, found in 1771 a solution that temporarily settled the issue but pleased no one: he awarded Bradstreet 20,000 acres (80 km2) in what is now Delaware County but said nothing about the legality of the original patent. Back in London the Privy Council urged King George III to block it, and he duly ordered the new governor, William Tryon, not to sign any grant for the land. Bradstreet died in 1774, and his daughters were widely expected to take the fight to court, but very soon that took a backseat to other events.

As tensions increased between the colonies and Britain during the early 1770s over how to pay for the war, the Catskills saw this divide play out rather sharply. The large landowners like Livingston and the Hardenberghs, fearing Parliament would settle the matter with a land tax that would vastly cut into their wealth, increasingly took stands that would lead to independence. Their tenant farmers, on the other hand, were, as Livingston put it, "resolved to stand by their King," despite their landlords' efforts to drum up revolutionary sentiment among them, in the belief that if it came down to war, the Crown would confiscate the holdings of those who had opposed it and distribute smaller parcels back to those who had been loyal. This came to a head in 1777, when Lieutenant Jacob Rose raised an army of several hundred of the region's young men to go fight alongside the British in return for 50 acres (0.2 km2) each. Rose's Rangers, as they were called, had to make its way through the strongly Patriot Hudson Valley to rendezvous with British regulars in New York City, however, and was captured in the vicinity of Schunemunk Mountain in Orange County after a skirmish with local militia. Prisoners were taken to Fort Montgomery and tried for treason against the recently established state of New York. Most were pardoned in exchange for committing to serve in the Continental Army; Rose and a few other holdouts were hanged. The failure of Rose's mission and the burning of Kingston by British forces that year severely blunted Tory sentiment in the Catskills, and for the remainder of the war the region posed no threat to the Patriot cause.

The Catskills became a major resort destination for Jewish New Yorkers in the mid 20th century. Borscht Belt is an informal term for the summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in Sullivan and Ulster counties in upstate New York which were frequented by Ashkenazic Jews. At its peak of popularity, about 500 resorts operated in the region. Later changes in vacationing patterns have led most of those travelers elsewhere, although there are still bungalow communities and summer camps in the towns of Liberty, Bethel, Monticello and Fallsburg catering to Orthodox populations. The term, which derives from the name of a beet soup popular with people of Eastern European origin, can also refer to the Catskill region itself.

In August, 1969, the Catskills were the site of a music and art festival in the town of Bethel, which had originally been planned for Woodstock, New York. Thirty three of the best known musicians of the era appeared during a sometimes rainy weekend in front of nearly half a million concertgoers. The event, featuring liberal drug use and nudity, exemplified the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.