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Cleveland was founded on July 22, 1796, by surveyors of the Connecticut Land Company led by General Moses Cleaveland, who laid out the settlement at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River on Lake Erie; the city later dropped the first "a" from his name.

Cleveland is the county seat of Cuyahoga County, the second-most populous city in Ohio after Columbus, and the most populous city on Lake Erie, with 372,624 residents at the 2020 census.

Cleveland has about 170,000 households, but only around 42% of its homes are owner-occupied, one of the lower homeownership rates among large American cities.

The completion of the Ohio and Erie Canal in 1832 turned Cleveland into a booming Great Lakes port, and by 1920 it was the fifth-largest city in the United States with 796,841 people; its population peaked at 914,808 in 1950.

John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870, and the fortune it created helped build many of the city's cultural institutions.

Before the Civil War, Cleveland was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, code-named "Station Hope," where escaping enslaved people crossed Lake Erie to Canada.

In November 1967, Cleveland became the first major American city to elect an African American mayor, Carl B. Stokes.

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland famously caught fire in June 1969 because of industrial pollution, an event that helped catalyze the modern American environmental movement.

Cleveland is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an I.M. Pei-designed museum on the Lake Erie shore that was dedicated on September 1, 1995; Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed popularized the term "rock and roll" and staged the Moondog Coronation Ball in 1952, often called the first rock concert.

Playhouse Square in downtown Cleveland is the largest performing arts center in the United States outside of New York's Lincoln Center.