Short answers, pulled from the story.
Charlotte had a population of 874,579 at the 2020 census, making it the 14th-most populous city in the United States and the most populous city in North Carolina. The Charlotte metropolitan area has an estimated 2.88 million residents, ranking as the 21st-largest metropolitan area in the country.
Charlotte was named in honor of Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who became queen consort of Great Britain and Ireland in 1761, seven years before the town's incorporation in 1768, giving it the nickname Queen City. The Hornet's Nest nickname comes from the American Revolutionary War, when British commander General Charles Cornwallis occupied the city but was driven out by hostile residents and wrote that Charlotte was "a hornet's nest of rebellion."
Charlotte became the second-largest banking headquarters city after New York City largely through the efforts of financier Hugh McColl, who in the 1970s and 1980s transformed North Carolina National Bank into a national institution that eventually merged with BankAmerica to become Bank of America. Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. financial institution by total assets, is headquartered in Charlotte, as is Truist Financial, the nation's sixth-largest financial institution.
The first documented gold find of consequence in the United States occurred in 1799 in nearby Cabarrus County, when 12-year-old Conrad Reed found a 17-pound rock that his family used as a doorstop for three years before a jeweler identified it as nearly solid gold. The discovery set off the nation's first gold rush, led to numerous gold finds across the region throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and prompted the founding of the Charlotte Mint in 1837. North Carolina remained the chief gold-producing state in the country until gold was discovered in the Sierra Nevada in 1848.
Charlotte is home to the Carolina Panthers of the NFL, the Charlotte Hornets of the NBA, and Charlotte FC of MLS, along with the minor-league Charlotte Checkers in ice hockey and the Charlotte Knights in Triple-A baseball. The Panthers have reached the Super Bowl twice, and the Hornets franchise dates to an original expansion team established in 1988.
Hurricane Hugo struck Charlotte on the 22nd of September 1989, with sustained winds of 69 mph and gusts of 87 mph, destroying 80,000 trees and knocking out electrical power to most of the population. Residents were without power for weeks, schools were closed for a week or more, and cleanup took months. The city was caught unprepared because Charlotte sits 200 miles inland and residents from coastal areas often travel there to wait out hurricanes.