Eight Cities and How They Began

The Romans built a military camp called Lousanna at the site of a Celtic settlement near the lake, close to where the Vidy and Ouchy districts now stand. Today Lausanne is the capital of the canton of Vaud on Lake Geneva and, since 1994, the Olympic Capital.

Zurich was founded by the Romans as Turicum, and its earliest written record is a second century tombstone naming the Statio Turicensis Quadragesima Galliarum. It has been permanently settled for over 2,000 years and is now Switzerland's largest city.

Established in 1635, Hartford is among the oldest cities in the United States. It is the capital of Connecticut and is home to the nation's oldest continuously operating public art museum and oldest continuously published newspaper.

Montreal was founded on 17 May 1642 as Ville-Marie, City of Mary, on the southern shore of its island, with Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve as first governor. It now has 1,762,949 people in the city and is the largest primarily French-speaking city in the Americas.

Europeans first settled Concord in 1659, and it took its present name in 1765 to signify harmony after a boundary dispute. The New Hampshire State House, completed in 1819, is the oldest U.S. state capitol where the legislature still meets in its original chambers.

Founded in 1670 as Charles Town and rebuilt as Nassau in 1695, the city was named for William III of England, Prince of Orange-Nassau. It is a former pirate stronghold and is now the commercial and administrative center of the Bahamas, with 296,732 people in 2022.

Charleston, at the confluence of the Elk and Kanawha rivers, grew through nineteenth century salt production and later coal mining and the first natural gas well discovery. It became West Virginia's permanent state capital in 1885, after the state separated from Virginia.

Oklahoma City was founded in a historic land run, and has grown into the capital and most populous city of Oklahoma. Its livestock markets and oil production make it a major economic center, and it ranks as the twenty first largest city in the United States.