The lavish home of the automotive company's founder, Parkwood Estate, is a National Historic Site of Canada is located in the city.

Once recognized as the sole "Automotive Capital of Canada",[9] Oshawa is now considered to be an education and health sciences hub, although General Motors still plays a significant role in the city's economy.

After having been closed for about 2 years, the Oshawa car assembly plant reopened on 10 November 2021, when the first Canadian-made Chevy Silverado was completed.

Furs were loaded onto canoes by the Mississauga Natives at the Oshawa harbour and transported to the trading posts located to the west at the mouth of the Credit River.

Most notably, one of the fur traders was Moody Farewell, an early resident of the community who was to some extent responsible for its name change.

In the late 18th century a local resident, Roger Conant, started an export business shipping salmon to the United States.

As well, the surveys ordered by Governor John Graves Simcoe, and the subsequent land grants, helped populate the area.

[15] The newly established village became an industrial centre, and implement works, tanneries, asheries and wagon factories opened (and often closed shortly after, as economic "panics" occurred regularly).

In 1878, Robert Samuel McLaughlin Sr. moved his carriage works to Oshawa from Enniskillen to take advantage of its harbour and of the availability of a rail link not too far away.

This building was heavily remodelled in 1929, receiving a new facade and being extended to the north using land where the city's "gaol" (jail, firehall and townhall) had once stood.

Around 1890, the carriage works relocated from its Simcoe Street address to an unused furniture factory a couple of blocks to the northeast, and this remained its site until the building burned down in 1899.

On 8 April 1937, disputes between 4,000 assembly line workers and General Motors management led to the Oshawa Strike, a salient event in the history of Canadian trade unionism.

The then-Liberal government of Mitchell Hepburn, which had been elected on a platform of being the working man's friend, sided with the corporation and brought in armed university students to break up any union agitation.

Oshawa was amalgamated with the remaining portions of East Whitby Township and took on its present boundaries, which included the outlying villages of Columbus, Raglan and Kedron.

[24] Oshawa is headquarters to General Motors Canada, which has large-scale manufacturing and administrative operations in the city and employs many thousands both directly and indirectly.

[31] On 4 November 2020, GM announced "Subject to ratification of the 2020 agreement with Unifor, General Motors plans to bring pickup production back to the Oshawa Assembly Plant.

[32] The city's older southern neighbourhoods tend to be considerably less affluent than its more suburban northern sections, which are rapidly expanding as Toronto commuters move in.

During its heyday after World War II, General Motors offered some of the best manufacturing jobs available in Canada and attracted thousands of workers from economically depressed areas of the country, particularly the Maritimes, Newfoundland, rural Quebec and northern Ontario.

The city was also a magnet for European immigrants in the skilled trades, and boasts substantial Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Croatian, German, Slovak and Russian ethnic communities.

Oshawa has become one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada, although statements to this effect are often in reference to the Census Metropolitan Area, which includes neighbouring Whitby and Clarington.

The city has been attracting film and television producers[37] who have made parts of a number of movies and TV series in Oshawa,[38] most recently It (based on the Stephen King book),[39] but also Billy Madison, Chicago, and X-Men.

[42] The dominant presence of General Motors (and its autoworkers) meant that Oshawa was well known as a bastion of unionist, left-wing support during the decades following the Second World War.

Starr served the new Oshawa-Whitby riding for one term, before being narrowly defeated by future federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent in 1968.

The candidate of the new Conservative Party of Canada, Colin Carrie, edged out his NDP rival Sid Ryan by several hundred votes; it was an atypical and ideologically stark race that left Louise Parkes of the Liberals in third place.

In 2015, the Oshawa Generals won the Ontario Hockey League Championship, and ended their season winning the 2015 Memorial Cup.

Famous alumni of this team include Bobby Orr, Alex Delvecchio, Wayne Cashman, Tony Tanti, Dave Andreychuk, Marc Savard, Eric Lindros, and John Tavares.

[52] In September 2018, the city hosted its first National Hockey League preseason game, when the Buffalo Sabres and New York Islanders played an exhibition contest.

[54] Oshawa was home to Windfields Farm, a thoroughbred horse breeding operation and birthplace of one of Canada's most famous racehorses, Northern Dancer.

The Port of Oshawa is a major stop for the auto and steel industries as well as winter road salt handling and agricultural fertilizer.

[60] On 24 April 2020, General Motors Canada reopened the city's local plant in order to manufacture Personal protective equipment for healthcare workers treating patients infected with COVID-19 during the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic.