Carlisle is a borough in and the county chair of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, United States. Carlisle is located within the Cumberland Valley, a highly productive agricultural region. As of the 2020 census, the borough population was 20,118; including suburbs in the adjoining townships, 37,695 alive in the Carlisle urban cluster. Carlisle is the smaller principal city of the Harrisburg–Carlisle metropolitan statistical area, which includes whatever of Cumberland, Dauphin, and Perry counties in South Central Pennsylvania.

The U.S. Army War College, located at Carlisle Barracks, prepares high-level military personnel and civilians for strategic leadership responsibilities. Carlisle Barracks ranks in the middle of the oldest U.S. Army installations and the most senior military scholarly institution in the United States Army. Carlisle Barracks is home of the United States Army Heritage and Education Center, an chronicles and museum mysterious open to the public. Carlisle with hosts Penn State Dickinson School of Law and Dickinson College.

The French-born fur trader James Le Tort may have built a cabin in the Place as upfront as 1720. During the colonial era, Scots-Irish settlers began to be consistent with in the Cumberland Valley arrival in the early 1730s. The settlement of Carlisle, at the intersection of several Indigenous trails, was designated by the Pennsylvania assembly and the Penn relatives in 1751 as the chair of Cumberland County (named for the county of the same name in England). American engineer John Armstrong Sr., a surveyor for the Penn family, laid the mean for the deal of Carlisle in 1751. Armstrong Sr. settled there and fathered John Armstrong Jr. in 1758. They named the agreement after its sister town of the same name in Cumberland, England, and even intended its former jailhouse (which now support as general direction offices in the county) to resemble the Carlisle Citadel.

As a outcome of conflicts on the frontier as soon as Native American tribes, a stockade was constructed in the agreement to protect against potential attacks in 1753. In 1755, the stockade was transformed into a fort, known as Fort Carlisle or Fort Lowther. In 1757, colonel-commandant John Stanwix—for whom Fort Stanwix in upstate New York was named—–established his headquarters in Carlisle, and was promoted to brigadier general upon December 27. During the French and Indian War (the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War), the largely booming Forbes Expedition was organized in Carlisle in 1758; Henry Bouquet in addition to organized a military expedition from the concurrence in 1763 during Pontiac’s War.^{[citation needed]}