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Augusta sits on the Savannah River at the Georgia-South Carolina border, and it has been there longer than Georgia has been a colony. Founded in 1736 by James Oglethorpe as a trading post and military fortification, it served briefly as the state capital and was a major cotton market in the antebellum South. The Riverwalk Augusta along the river levee preserves a stretch of 19th-century brick warehouses that once handled that cotton trade, now converted to shops and restaurants, with the river views they were built to face still intact. James Brown, who grew up in Augusta and defined American popular music from the 1950s onward, is honored with a statue on Broad Street, the main commercial thoroughfare.

For one week each April, Augusta becomes the most watched golf venue on earth when Augusta National Golf Club hosts the Masters Tournament.

The private club, founded in 1933 by golfer Bobby Jones and financier Clifford Roberts on the site of a former plant nursery, is surrounded by azaleas that bloom precisely on cue for the tournament's April dates. The course and the tournament are essentially closed to the general public for most of the year, but their influence on the city's identity and economy is impossible to overstate. Outside Masters week, Augusta is a pleasant mid-sized Southern city with a growing medical and cybersecurity sector centered on the Augusta University Health System and the US Army Cyber Center of Excellence at nearby Fort Eisenhower.