Straight from the Wikipedia page on Charleston:

Charleston is the oldest and second-largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston–North Charleston–Summerville Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint of South Carolina’s coastline and is located on Charleston Harbor, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. Charleston had an estimated population of 132,609 in 2015. The population of the Charleston metropolitan area, comprising Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester Counties, was counted by the 2015 estimate at 727,689—the third-largest in the state—and the 78th-largest metropolitan statistical area in the United States.

Charleston was founded as Charles Town—honoring King Charles II of England—in 1670. Its initial location at Albemarle Point on the west bank of the Ashley River (now Charles Towne Landing) was abandoned in 1680 for its present site, which became the 5th-largest city in North America within 10 years. It adopted its present spelling with its incorporation as a city in 1783 at the close of the Revolutionary War.

The only major American city to have a majority-enslaved population, Antebellum Charleston was controlled by a militarized oligarchy of white planters and merchants who successfully forced the federal government to revise its 1828 and 1832 tariffs during the Nullification Crisis and launched the Civil War by seizing the Arsenal, Castle Pinckney, and Fort Sumter from their federal garrisons.

Known for its rich history, well-preserved architecture, distinguished restaurants, and mannerly people, Charleston is a popular tourist destination and has received a large number of accolades, including “America’s Most Friendly [City]” by Travel + Leisure in 2011 and in 2013 and 2014 by Condé Nast Traveler, and also “the most polite and hospitable city in America” by Southern Living magazine.

In 2016, Charleston was ranked the “World’s Best City” by Travel + Leisure .

Climate

Charleston has a humid subtropical climate, with mild winters, hot, humid summers, and significant rainfall all year long. Summer is the wettest season; almost half of the annual rainfall occurs from June to September in the form of thundershowers. Fall remains relatively warm through November. Winter is short and mild, and is characterized by occasional rain. Measurable snow (≥0.1″) only occurs several times per decade at the most.

The highest temperature recorded within city limits was 104°F on June 2, 1985, and June 24, 1944, and the lowest was 7°F on February 14, 1899. Hurricanes are a major threat to the area during the summer and early fall.

History (focusing on issues of Race)

The first settlers primarily came from England and its colonies on Barbados and Bermuda. Protestant French, Scottish, Irish, and Germans immigrated, as did hundreds of Jews, predominately Sephardi. As late as 1830, Charleston continued to house the largest and wealthiest Jewish community in America. Because of the struggles of the English Reformation and particularly because the papacy long recognized James II‘s son as the rightful king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, openly-practicing Roman Catholics were prohibited from settling in South Carolina throughout the colonial period.

By 1708, however, the majority of the colony’s population were black Africans. They had been brought to Charlestown on the Middle Passage, first as “servants” and then as slaves. Of the estimated 400,000 Africans transported to North America for sale as slaves, 40% are thought to have landed at Sullivan’s Island off Charlestown, a “hellish Ellis Island of sorts”. With no official monument marking this role, the writer Toni Morrison organized a privately-funded commemorative bench.

Free people of color also arrived from the West Indies, where wealthy whites took black consorts and color lines were (especially early on) looser among the working class. South Carolina continued to have a black majority until after the Great Migration of the early 20th century.

By the mid-18th century, Charlestown was the hub of the Atlantic trade of England’s southern colonies. The plantations and the economy based on [slavery] made it the wealthiest city in British North America and the largest south of Philadelphia. Its 11,000 inhabitants—half slaves—made it the 4th-largest port after Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in 1770. The money also paid for cultural and social development. Charlestown saw America’s first theater building in 1736 at the site of today’s Dock Street Theater.

Throughout the Antebellum Period [post Revolutionary War], Charleston continued to be the only major American city with a majority slave population. The city’s commitment to slavery was the primary focus of writers and visitors: a merchant from Liverpool noted in 1834 that “almost all the working population are Negroes, all the servants, the carmen & porters, all the people who see at the stalls in Market, and most of the Journeymen in trades”. American traders had been prohibited from equipping the Atlantic slave trade in 1794 and all importation of slaves was banned in 1808, but American ships long refused to permit British inspection and smuggling remained common. The 19th century saw the city’s first dedicated slave markets, mostly near Chalmers & State Streets.

Slave-ownership was the primary marker of class and even the town’s freedmen and other people of color typically kept slaves if they had the wealth to do so. Visitors commonly remarked on the sheer number of blacks in Charleston and their seeming freedom of movement, though in fact—mindful of the Stono Rebellion and the violent slave revolution that established Haiti—the whites closely regulated the behavior of both slaves and free people of color. Wages and hiring practices were fixed, identifying badges were sometimes required, and even work songs were sometimes censored.

The effects of slavery were pronounced on white society as well. The high cost of 19th-century slaves and their high rate of return combined to institute an oligarchic society controlled by about ninety interrelated families, where 4% of the free population controlled half of the wealth and the lower half of the free population — unable to compete with owned or rented slaves — held no wealth at all. The white middle class was minimal: Charlestonians generally disparaged hard work as the lot of slaves. All the slaveholders taken together made up 82% of the city’s wealth and almost all non-slaveholders were poor. Olmsted considered their civic elections “entirely contests of money and personal influence” and the oligarchs dominated civic planning: the lack of public parks and amenities was noted, as was the abundance of private gardens in the wealthy’s walled estates.

In the 1810s, the town’s churches intensified their discrimination against their black parishioners, culminating in Bethel Methodist‘s 1817 construction of a hearse house over its black burial ground. 4,376 black Methodists joined Morris Brown in establishing Hampstead Church, the African Methodist Episcopal church now known as Mother Emanuel. State and city laws prohibited black literacy, limited black worship to daylight hours, and required that a majority of any church’s parishioners be white.

By 1840, the Market Hall and Sheds, where fresh meat and produce were brought daily, became a hub of commercial activity. The slave trade also depended on the port of Charleston, where ships could be unloaded and the slaves bought and sold. The legal importation of African slaves had ended in 1808, although smuggling was significant. However, the domestic trade was booming. More than one million slaves were transported from the Upper South to the Deep South in the antebellum years, as cotton plantations were widely developed through what became known as the Black Belt. Many slaves were transported in the coastwise slave trade, with slave ships stopping at ports such as Charleston.

Civil War (1861–1865)

Following the election of Abraham Lincoln, the South Carolina General Assembly voted on December 20, 1860 to secede from the Union.

The first full battle of the American Civil War occurred on April 12, 1861 when shore batteries under the command of General Beauregard opened fire on the US Army-held Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. After a 34-hour bombardment, Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort. On December 11, 1861, an enormous fire burned over 500 acres of the city.

Union control of the sea permitted the repeated bombardment of the city, causing vast damage.

The fall of Columbia and advance of General William T. Sherman‘s army through the state prompted the Confederates to evacuate the town on February 17, 1865, burning the public buildings, cotton warehouses, and other sources of supply before their departure. Union troops moved into the city within the month.

Reconstruction (1865–1945)

After the defeat of the Confederacy, federal forces remained in Charleston during Reconstruction. The war had shattered the city’s prosperity, but the African-American population surged (from 17,000 in 1860 to over 27,000 in 1880) as freedmen moved from the countryside to the major city. Blacks quickly left the Southern Baptist Church and resumed open meetings of the African Methodist Episcopal and AME Zion churches. They purchased dogs, guns, liquor, and better clothes—all previously banned—and ceased yielding the sidewalks to whites.

Despite the efforts of the state legislature to halt manumissions, Charleston had already had a large class of free people of color as well. At the onset of the war, the city had 3,785 free people of color, many of mixed race, making up about 18% of the city’s black population and 8% of its total population. Many were educated and practiced skilled crafts; they quickly became leaders of South Carolina’s Republican Party and its legislators. Men who had been free people of color before the war comprised 26% of those elected to state and federal office in South Carolina from 1868 to 1876.

In 1875, blacks made up 57% of the city’s and 73% of the county’s population. With leadership by members of the antebellum free black community, historian Melinda Meeks Hennessy described the community as “unique” in being able to defend themselves without provoking “massive white retaliation”, as occurred in numerous other areas during Reconstruction.

Violent incidents occurred throughout the Piedmont of the state as white insurgents struggled to maintain white supremacy in the face of social changes after the war and granting of citizenship to freedmen by federal constitutional amendments.

Contemporary era (1945–present)

Charleston languished economically for several decades in the 20th century, though the large federal military presence in the region helped to shore up the city’s economy.

The Charleston Hospital Strike of 1969, in which mostly black workers protested discrimination and low wages, was one of the last major events of the civil rights movement. It attracted Ralph Abernathy, Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young, and other prominent figures to march with the local leader, Mary Moultrie.

The last 30 years of the 20th century had major new investments in the city, with a number of municipal improvements and a commitment to historic preservation to restore the city’s unique fabric. There was an effort to preserve working-class housing of African Americans on the historic peninsula, but the neighborhood has gentrified, with rising prices and rents. From 1980 to 2010, the peninsula’s population has shifted from two-thirds black to two-thirds white; in 2010 residents numbered 20,668 whites to 10,455 blacks. Many African Americans have moved to the less-expensive suburbs in these decades.

Do visit the Wikipedia page for more information about Charleston…