Arnhem is older than its river. The earliest settlement on the Hoogkamp dates from around 1500 BC, and traces in the inner city near the Sint-Jansbeek go back to roughly 700 BC. For most of its history Arnhem was not a Rhine city at all but a stream city, built where the road from Nijmegen split toward Utrecht and Zutphen, watered by seven small creeks. The Rhine itself only arrived here in 1530, when its flow shifted. The town was first named in writing in 893 as Arneym, granted city rights in 1233, and joined the Hanseatic League in 1443. Charles the Bold of Burgundy captured it in 1473, the Spanish lost it to Dutch and English troops in 1585, and it has been the capital of the province of Gelderland ever since.

Operation Market Garden began on 17 September 1944. The British 1st Airborne Division under Major-General Roy Urquhart, with the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade attached, was assigned the farthest objective of an ambitious airborne assault: the bridge at Arnhem. The bulk of the force was dropped 8 miles from the city and never reached the bridge. Only the 2nd Parachute Battalion, led by Lieutenant Colonel John Frost, made it to the northern ramp, where it held against German armor of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions for four days. The British force ran out of ammunition and was captured on 21 September. The remaining airborne troops were withdrawn across the river on 26 September. The 1977 film A Bridge Too Far would dramatize what happened. The bridge scenes had to be filmed in Deventer because Arnhem had changed too much to play itself.

What the September battle began, the months that followed completed. The Germans forcibly evacuated Arnhem's civilian population during and after the fighting. A second battle in April 1945, when the British 49th (West Riding) Infantry Division liberated the city as part of the First Canadian Army, found it largely empty. Inhabitants began returning in the summer of 1945 to streets damaged by months of artillery and looting. Reconstruction was not declared complete until 1969, nearly 25 years after liberation. The rebuilt Grote Kerk, dedicated to Saint Eusebius and originally built between 1452 and 1560, lost most of its tower in the war; the partial reconstruction in a deliberately modern design opened in 1964 and is owned not by the church but by the municipality, a quiet civic decision about who carries the past.

The Netherlands Open Air Museum sits in the wooded north of the municipality, gathering antique farmhouses, factories, and windmills from across the country onto one site that operates as a kind of slow archive of pre-industrial Dutch life. The Royal Burgers' Zoo is one of the country's largest, with walk-through habitats from desert to mangrove to rainforest. The GelreDome, home of Eredivisie club Vitesse, debuted a retractable roof and a sliding grass pitch in 1998, a design later copied in Gelsenkirchen, Glendale, and partially in Sapporo. The Netherlands' only trolleybus network still runs its overhead wires through the streets. The national sports center at Papendal trains Olympians for 90 affiliated federations, and hosted the 1980 Summer Paralympics. Audrey Hepburn spent much of her wartime childhood in and around Arnhem, eventually sheltering in the nearby village of Velp; the physicist Hendrik Lorentz, who would share a Nobel Prize, was born here in 1853.

On 6 March 2025, a major fire broke out in the historic city center and destroyed a block of shops and the apartments above them. The damage was extensive but the city's response was practiced; Arnhem has done this kind of work before. The official commemoration of the September battle still falls on the 17th of each year, gathering veterans' descendants, paratroopers, and Dutch families at the John Frost Bridge. The events sit alongside the modern festival calendar, the Sonsbeek theater avenue, the World Statues festival, King's Day, the fairy tale festival, the metal meeting. A city that has had to start over more than once tends to value the ordinary occasions for which it gets to be a city.