Current Time in Durham, United States

Durham lies in the Piedmont of central North Carolina, in the rolling country between the Appalachian foothills and the coastal plain. With around two hundred and ninety thousand residents it is one of the fastest-growing cities in the American South and forms, with Raleigh and Chapel Hill, the metropolitan area known as the Research Triangle.

The city began as a railway stop in the 1850s and was transformed after the Civil War by tobacco. Washington Duke and his sons built one of the largest business empires in the country here, and the Bull Durham brand made the city's name known worldwide, giving it the nickname the Bull City. Tobacco warehouses, cigarette factories and textile mills employed thousands, drawing workers from the surrounding farms.

Durham also became one of the most important centres of Black enterprise in the United States. Along Parrish Street, a district known as Black Wall Street, entrepreneurs founded a life insurance company that grew into the largest African American owned business in the country and a bank that financed Black homeownership across the South. The nearby Hayti neighbourhood supported theatres, churches, schools and hundreds of businesses, and although urban renewal and highway construction damaged it severely in the 1960s, its legacy remains central to the city's identity, sustained by the Hayti Heritage Center and by North Carolina Central University, a historically Black university founded in 1910.

Duke University arrived in 1892 as Trinity College and was renamed in 1924 following an enormous endowment from the tobacco fortune. Its Gothic West Campus, dominated by Duke Chapel and its carillon, is one of the most beautiful university precincts in America, and its gardens, art museum, forest and lemur centre, the largest sanctuary for rare primates in the world, are open to visitors. Duke's medical centre is among the leading hospitals in the country, and together with Research Triangle Park, founded in 1959 and now one of the largest research parks anywhere, it makes the region a global centre for biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and information technology.

Downtown has been reinvented around the American Tobacco Campus, where the old factory buildings now hold offices, restaurants and startups beside the ballpark of the Durham Bulls, the minor league baseball team made famous by a 1988 film. The Durham Performing Arts Center is among the busiest theatres in the country, the Museum of Life and Science entertains families, and the city has earned a national reputation for its restaurants and food culture. Eno River State Park and miles of greenway trails provide the outdoors.

Interstate highways cross the city, Raleigh-Durham International Airport is fifteen minutes away, and Amtrak trains serve the restored downtown station.

Diverse, well educated and creative, with a strong tradition of civil rights activism and a startup culture built on its universities, Durham combines Southern history with a distinctly forward-looking energy.