The city was founded in 1788 at the point where a Native American trading route crossed the river. Its name comes from a group of Revolutionary War admirers of the Roman general Cincinnatus, who saved Rome in 458 BC and then returned to his small farm and refused to accept any reward or glory. Cincinnati quickly became an important supply point for pioneers heading west on flatboats and rafts, and its population skyrocketed with the establishment of a major steamboat riverport in 1811. Tens of thousands of German immigrants poured in during the 1830s.

Loyalties were split by the Civil War . At first, merchants were perturbed by the loss of important markets; then they began to pick up lucrative government contracts, and the city decided that its future lay with the Union. In the prosperous postwar decade, Cincinnati acquired Fountain Square, the prodigious Music and Exhibition Hall, a zoo, art museum, public library and the country's first professional baseball team. Sport remains a great source of pride: downtown gift shops are decked out in the orange and black of the Bengals football team and the red and white of the baseball-playing Reds .

A Cincinnati success story is the Rookwood Pottery , started by Maria Storer in Mount Adams in 1880. Its distinctive tiles adorn countless downtown Art Deco landmarks, as well as the Union and Dixie train terminals.

Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill and Longfellow all admired Cincinnati; Mark Twain, on the other hand, said that he hoped to be in Cincinnati when the world ended, as it's always twenty years behind everywhere else