The area where Daytona Beach is located today was once inhabited by the Timucua, a indigenous people, living in fortified villages. The near-extermination of the Timucua is due to their various contacts with Europeans through war, slavery and disease; they spread out as a racial entity by assimilation and attrition during the ^eighteenth century. The Seminoles, descendants of the Creeks of Georgia and Alabama, frequented the area that existed before the Second Seminary War.

A Timucua village palissade

During the period when the British dominated Florida between 1763 and 1783, King's Road crossed what is now Daytona Beach. This road stretches from St. Augustine, the capital of East Florida, to the experimental colony of Andrew Turnbull, located in New Smyrna Beach. In 1804, Samuel Williams received a 3,000-acre land concession (12 km²) from the Spanish crown that had taken Florida back to the English after the American Revolution. This land concession included the area that would later become Daytona Beach. Williams built a plantation of cotton, rice and sugar cane, which would work thanks to the slave labor. Her son, Samuel Colline Williams, was forced to abandon the plantation during the Second Seminole War, when the Indians of that tribe burned it entirely.

In 1871, Mathias Day, Jr., originally from Mansfield, Ohio, purchased a plot of 2,144.5 acres, part of William's former plantation, located on the west bank of the tidal channel known as Halifax River. He built a hotel around which the city formed and which has now become the historic district of Daytona Beach. In 1872, due to financial difficulties, he lost his land, the inhabitants decided to appoint the city Daytona in honor of its founder and the city was incorporated in 1876.

In 1886, the St. Johns & Halifax River Railway arrived at Daytona. The line was purchased in 1889 by Henry M. Flagler, who incorporated it into the Florida East Coast Railway, a railway owned by him. The separate cities of Daytona, Daytona Beach, Kingston, and Seabreeze merged to become Daytona Beach in 1926, at the instigation of municipal leader J.B. Kahn and others. In the 1920s, it was nicknamed "The World's Most Famous Beach".

The smooth, compact sand of Daytona's vast beach attracted car and motorcycle racing as early as 1902, when pioneers of the industry tested their inventions. It hosted the ground speed record trials that began in 1904, when William K. Vanderbilt sets an unofficial record of 148,554 km/h. The ground speed riders, from Barney Oldfield and Henry Segrave to Malcolm Campbell, went to Daytona several times and made the 37 km of beach famous.

Attempts to break the record, including numerous fatal tests such as Frank Lockhart's in 1926 and Lee Bible's in 1929, continued until Campbell's trial on March 7, 1935, which set the record at 445,492km/h and Thus marked the end of the ground speed races at Daytona.

On March 8, 1936, the first stock race was held on the Daytona Beach Road Course (en), located in the town that currently bears the name of Ponce Inlet. In 1958, Bill France Sr (en) and NASCAR created the Daytona International Speedway to replace the circuit on the beach. Across most of the beach, cars are still allowed to drive at a maximum speed of 16 km/h.

The city of Daytona Beach is divided into two by the lagoon of the Halifax River (en), part of the Intracoastal Waterway, and is located on the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered to the north by Holly Hill and Ormond Beach and to the south by Daytona Beach Shores, South Daytona and Port Orange.

Daytona Beach has a humid subtropical climate like most of Florida, which means it has two seasons. The wet season from May to October and the dry and warmer season from November to April.

Cyclones

Tropical cyclones usually go offshore once they reach the northern part of Florida's Atlantic coast. As such, the risk of hurricane for Daytona Beach is significantly lower than in areas of southern Florida, such as Miami and Key West. The 2004 hurricane season was by far the most active in the Daytona Beach area in the past 50 years. However, since 1950, there has been only one hurricane in the Daytona Beach area, Donna in 1960.

Although Daytona Beach has a significantly lower risk of tornado than areas such as the Great Plains and the Midwest, there have been some murderous and destructive tornadoes in the Daytona Beach area over the past 100 years. More recently, on February 22, 1998, a tornado killed three people, injured 70 and caused $31 million in damage.

In 2010, the population stood at 61,005 inhabitants. of which 33,920 households. The ethnic distribution was 57.8 % of Euro-Americans, and 35.4 % of African-Americans.

Average per capita income was $17,530, with 23.6 % of the population living below the poverty line.

English was the first language of 90.37 %, followed by Spanish (4%), French (0.9%) and German (0.86%).

The Museum of Arts and Sciences (en) is the main cultural facility of Daytona Beach and Volusia County. Other museums located in the city include the Museum of Southeast Photography (en) and the Historic Museum of Halifax (en).

The Museum of Arts and Sciences is actually a collection of museums and art galleries and includes the Klancke environmental complex, the Cuban museum, the Root family museum featuring one of the largest collections around Coca-Cola in the world, the Dow American gallery and the Bouchelle des Arts Décoratifs center, which together form what is probably one of the most beautiful collections of furniture and decorative arts in the southeast.

There are also traveling exhibitions and a children's science center open in 2008.

• Bethune-Cookman University, private university for black people

• Cuban politician Fulgencio Batista and his wife Marta Fernandez Miranda de Batista lived there from 1945 to 1952.

•  Bayonne (France) since 1998

• (en) This article is partially or entirely from the Wikipedia article entitled "Daytona Beach" (see list of authors).