The Queen City on the Ohio River — where 19th-century German immigrants built over 300 breweries, created a neighbourhood (Over-the-Rhine) with the finest concentration of Italianate architecture in the United States, invented Cincinnati chili (spaghetti + beanless meat sauce + five spices, served as a '3-way'), and the Cincinnati Art Museum in Eden Park has operated with free general admission since 1886
Cincinnati (310,000; metro 2.3 million) is Ohio's largest city, straddling the Ohio River on the Kentucky border — a city that grew rapidly in the early 19th century as the meat-packing and brewing capital of the American Midwest, earning the nickname 'Porkopolis' for its role processing pigs from the surrounding farms (an estimated 500,000 pigs slaughtered annually by 1860). The city's German immigrant population (arriving in massive numbers after the failed revolutions of 1848 — the 'Forty-Eighters') built the Over-the-Rhine neighbourhood (named for the Rhine River, as the Miami and Erie Ca…
The Miami, Shawnee, and Cherokee peoples occupied the Ohio River valley for millennia before European contact — the area's strategic position at the confluence of major rivers made it a significant trade and cultural crossroads. Cincinnati was founded in 1788 as 'Losantiville' (a playful Greco-Latin-French-English portmanteau for 'city opposite the mouth of the Licking River') and renamed Cincinnati in 1790 after the Society of the Cincinnati (Roman general Cincinnatus, who returned to farming after defeating Rome's enemies). The Underground Railroad passed through Cincinnati — Harriet Beeche…