Before Norfolk, there was K'che-sepi-ack, which the Chesepian people called home in the late sixteenth century. According to William Strachey, the Powhatan destroyed their settlements shortly before Jamestown was founded in 1607. The land that became Norfolk was part of Elizabeth Cittie, then Elizabeth City Shire, then New Norfolk County, named by the colonist Adam Thoroughgood for his birthplace in Norfolk, England. A wooden "Half Moone" fort went up in the late seventeenth century, acquired from the Powhatan Confederacy in exchange for 10,000 pounds of tobacco. The House of Burgesses established the Towne of Lower Norfolk County in 1680, and Norfolk was formally incorporated in 1705. By 1736 King George II had granted it a royal charter. The deep water at the confluence of the Elizabeth River and the Chesapeake Bay made it inevitable that the British Empire would build a port here, and inevitable that the British Empire would later burn it.

Lord Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of Virginia, made Norfolk the colonial capital in 1775 after fleeing Williamsburg, then partially destroyed it on January 1, 1776 from his ships after losing the Battle of Great Bridge in December 1775. American Patriot forces burned most of what remained in the days that followed, completing the destruction by February 6, 1776 to deny Dunmore any base of operations. Only the walls of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church survived; a cannonball from the bombardment is still embedded in its bricks. The city rebuilt, then burned again in a 1804 waterfront fire that took 300 buildings, then was raided unsuccessfully by the British during the War of 1812. The worst disaster was biological. In June 1855 the steamer Benjamin Franklin put into the port for repairs from the West Indies, where yellow fever was raging. Within weeks the disease was loose in Norfolk and Portsmouth. By the time cool weather killed off the mosquitoes that fall, about 3,000 people were dead, roughly a third of the city had fled, and Norfolk had been quarantined by every neighboring city.

Joseph Jenkins Roberts left Norfolk for Liberia in 1829 and became its first president in 1848. He was one of many free Black Norfolk natives who took ship from this port to West Africa under the American Colonization Society; most Black Americans did not want to leave at all, and said so. When the Civil War came in 1861, thousands of enslaved people from the region fled to Union lines once Norfolk was occupied in May 1862. They set up schools to learn to read, years before the war ended. In the next century, the city's struggle with desegregation took decades. In 1958 Governor J. Lindsay Almond closed Norfolk's schools rather than integrate them. The Virginia Supreme Court ordered them reopened. In February 1959, seventeen Black children entered six previously segregated Norfolk schools. Virginian-Pilot editor Lenoir Chambers won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for his sustained editorial campaign against massive resistance.

In 1907 Norfolk hosted the Jamestown Exposition on the Sewell's Point peninsula, with President Theodore Roosevelt and diplomats from twenty-one countries reviewing a massive naval display. Southern Democrats in Congress seized the moment and steered the federal government toward making the exposition grounds permanent. By 1917 Naval Air Station Hampton Roads was under construction. Today Naval Station Norfolk is the largest naval installation in the world: 62,000 active-duty personnel, 75 ships, 134 aircraft, headquarters of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, headquarters of NATO Allied Command Transformation. About 35 percent of the gross regional product of the Hampton Roads metro area comes from defense spending. The Chrysler Museum of Art, the Virginia Zoo, Nauticus, and the battleship USS Wisconsin are all downtown, but the city's underlying engine remains the Navy and the port.

Norfolk is sinking and the sea is rising, and the two are happening at the same time. The land beneath the city is slowly subsiding from geological causes; the Chesapeake's tidal levels are rising from climate change. A 2012 city study estimated that adapting to a one-foot rise in sea level would cost about a billion dollars. The Virginia Institute of Marine Science projected in 2013 that sea level in Norfolk could rise 5.5 feet or more by 2100 if current trends hold. Some neighborhoods already flood at high tide on clear, sunny days. The Elizabeth River Trail, the waterfront redevelopment, the cruise ship terminal at Nauticus, the restored Granby Street nightlife: all of it sits on ground that the ocean is reclaiming inch by inch. Norfolk is, in a slow way, becoming a test case for whether an American city can stay where it has been for 343 years when the sea level changes.