Scranton is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Lackawanna County. With a population of 76,328 as of the 2020 U.S. census, Scranton is the largest city in Northeastern Pennsylvania and the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre–Hazleton Metropolitan Statistical Area, which has a population of 562,037 as of 2020. It is the sixth-largest city in Pennsylvania. The contiguous network of five cities and more than 40 boroughs all built in a straight line in Northeastern Pennsylvania's urban core act culturally and logistically as one continuous city, so while the city of Scranton itself is a mid-sized city, the larger Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Urban Area contains half a million residents in roughly 300 square miles. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre is the cultural and economic center of a region called Northeastern Pennsylvania, which is home to over 1.3 million residents.
Scranton hosts a federal court building for the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. The city is conventionally divided into nine districts: North Scranton, Southside, Westside, Eastside/Hill Section, Central City, Minooka, West Mountain, East Mountain, and Green Ridge, though these areas do not have legal status. The city is the geographic and cultural center of the Lackawanna River valley (a local name for a small part of the Wyoming Valley) and Northeastern Pennsylvania, as well as the largest of the former anthracite coal mining communities in a contiguous quilt-work that also includes Wilkes-Barre, Nanticoke, Pittston, and Carbondale. Scranton was incorporated on February 14, 1856, as a borough in Luzerne County and as a city on April 23, 1866. It became a major industrial city and a center of mining and railroads; it attracted thousands of new immigrants. It was the site of the Scranton general strike in 1877.
People in northern Luzerne County sought a new county in 1839, but the Wilkes-Barre area resisted losing its assets. Lackawanna County did not gain independent status until 1878.