Short answers, pulled from the story.
Belfast derives from the Irish Béal Feirste, meaning 'Mouth of the Farset', a river whose Irish name refers to a sandbar or tidal ford. The Farset ran down what is now High Street until it was culverted late in the 18th century, and the early settlement developed at the crossing where it joined the Lagan.
Queen Victoria granted Belfast city status in 1888. At that time, Belfast was already the world's largest centre of linen manufacture, and the Baroque revival City Hall, completed in 1906, was built specifically to reflect that new status.
The RMS Titanic was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast and launched in 1911, at which point she was the largest ship afloat. The Titanic Quarter, a major redevelopment of the former shipyard land covering 0.75 square kilometres, is named in her honour, and Titanic Belfast opened there in 2012.
Approximately 1,500 people were killed in Belfast between the late 1960s and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, with more than 20,000 injured. Eighty-five percent of conflict-related deaths occurred within 1,000 metres of the communal interfaces in the north and west of the city.
The 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended the main phase of paramilitary conflict and returned a power-sharing legislative assembly and executive to Stormont. It was preceded by loyalist and republican ceasefires and established the framework for devolved government in Northern Ireland.
Belfast became a UNESCO City of Music in November 2021, becoming the third city in the British Isles to receive the designation after Glasgow in 2008 and Liverpool in 2016. It is one of 59 cities worldwide participating in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network.