[2] For thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers, the area now known as San Jose was inhabited by several groups of Ohlone Native Americans.

Don Pedro Fages, the military governor at Monterey, passed through the area on his 1770 and 1772 expeditions to explore the East Bay and Sacramento River Delta.

Late in 1775, Juan Bautista de Anza[4] led the first overland expedition to bring colonists from New Spain (Mexico) to California and to locate sites for two missions, one presidio, and one pueblo (town).

The town was founded by the colonists led to California by Anza, as a farming community to provide food for the presidios of San Francisco and Monterey.

During the Bear Flag Revolt, Captain Thomas Fallon led a small force from Santa Cruz and captured the pueblo without bloodshed on July 11, 1846.

Fallon received an American flag from John D. Sloat, and raised it over the pueblo on July 14, as the California Republic agreed to join the United States following the start of the Mexican–American War.

The cinnabar deposits were discovered in 1845 by a Mexican cavalry captain, Andres Castillero, when he recognized the red powder used by local Ohlone Indians to decorate the chapel at Mission Santa Clara.

The case drew international attention to San Jose, for the kidnapping, lynching, and for the praise that Governor, James Rolph directed to those who participated.

Anti-Mexican violence based on the earlier Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles took place in the summer of 1943 in San Jose.

Large numbers of black people from the Southern states moved to San Jose to work in the city's growing wartime manufacturing industry, during the Second Great Migration.

On May 26, 2021, a mass shooting occurred at a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) train yard in San Jose.

The 8-year-old San Jose High School's three-story stone and brick structure also collapsed, and many other buildings were severely damaged.

For nearly two centuries a farming community, San Jose produced a significant amount of fruits and vegetables until the 1960s, and many past and current names of teams, streets, buildings, and so on reflect its agricultural beginnings.

Food Machinery Corporation (FMC) was founded in nearby Los Gatos as the Bean Spray Pump Company in 1884 and moved to San Jose in 1903.

In 1941 the company received an order from the United States War Department for one thousand LVTs, bringing defense contracts to San Jose for the first time.

After World War II, FMC continued as a defense contractor, with the San Jose facilities designing and manufacturing military platforms such as the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and various subsystems of the M1 Abrams.

In 1952 they opened a downtown research and development lab, where Reynold Johnson and his team invented RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control).

In 1956 IBM opened its Cottle Road manufacturing facility in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, where disc drives were invented in 1962.

Hamann also spent significant time on the East Coast, selling San Jose as an ideal place for businesses to expand into.

Since then, San Jose has been governed by a liberal-managerial regime focused on growth management, neighborhood services, and fiscal solvency.

With the boom of the electronics industry, specifically personal computers and integrated circuits, the population of San Jose and Silicon Valley continued to grow rapidly.