In 1880, William E. Willmore bought 4,000 acres (16 km2) of the Rancho Los Cerritos and subdivided it, hoping to create a farm community named after himself--Willmore City. But the community was bought out by a Los Angeles syndicate called the "Long Beach Land and Water Company," and the City of Long Beach was officially incorporated in 1897.

With 8.5 miles of sandy shoreline, waterfront adventure is central to the city's charm.

Indigenous people have lived in coastal Southern California for over 10,000 years, and several successive cultures have inhabited the present-day area of Long Beach. By the 16th-century arrival of Spanish explorers, the dominant group was the Tongva people. They had at least three major settlements within the present-day city. Tevaaxa'anga was an inland settlement near the Los Angeles River, while Ahwaanga and Povuu'nga were coastal villages.

The discovery of the Long Beach Oil Field in 1921 made Long Beach a major oil producer. In 1923 alone, the field produced over 68 million barrels of oil, making it one of the most productive fields in the world.

The RMS Queen Mary is a retired British ocean liner that sailed the North Atlantic from 1936 to 1967. During World War II, the Queen Mary was converted into a troopship and ferried Allied soldiers. She was officially retired from service in 1967 and sailed to the port of Long Beach, California, where she remains permanently moored, serving as a restaurant, a museum and a hotel.

The city was part of the Battle of Los Angeles, which occurred less than three months after the U.S. entered World War II. After observers for the U.S. Army Air Forces reported shells being fired from the sea, anti-aircraft batteries fired into the night sky, although no planes were ever sighted. When documenting the incident in 1949, the United States Coast Artillery Association identified a meteorological balloon sent aloft at 1:00 am as having "started all the shooting" and concluded that "once the firing started, imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in".

In the 1950s, it was referred to as "Iowa by the sea" due to a large influx of people from that and other Midwestern states.

Terminal Island, historically known as Isla Raza de Buena Gente and also called Rattlesnake Island, is a largely artificial island split between the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach. Land use on the island is entirely industrial and port-related except for Federal Correctional Institution, Terminal Island, a low-security United States federal prison.

Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose was an enormous, eight-engine airplane constructed mostly of wood due to wartime restrictions on the use of metal. Although it wasn't completed in time to be used in the war, the Spruce Goose made one brief flight, taking off over Long Beach Harbor on November 2, 1947, and proving to many critics that a 219-foot long airplane with a wingspan of 320 feet was capable of flight.

The Pike was founded in 1902 along the shoreline south of Ocean Boulevard with several independent arcades, food stands, gift shops, a variety of rides and a grand bath house. It was most noted for the Cyclone Racer (1930-1968), a large wooden dual-track roller coaster, built out on pilings over the water.