After the Union captured the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1861, Lucy McKim Garrison (1842-1877) and her father traveled to them. About 10,000 enslaved people were now free. Lucy became enthralled by the emotions expressed in African American songs and their great diversity of styles. She began writing their words and setting them in musical notation.

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was an English chemist who used special X-ray images of tiny structures, known as X-ray crystallography. She examined molecules to understand their shape and structure. Her work helped reveal the molecular structures of DNA and RNA, as well as those of viruses, coal, and graphite. She is most famous for capturing "Photo 51" which showed DNA's helical structure

Slavery never disappears; it just evolves and continues to influence its subjects in different ways. One manifestation was the “Lost Cause” view of slavery and the Civil War.

Wells is best known for her fearless anti‑lynching crusade in the late 19th century, which exposed lynching as a tool of racial terror rather than criminal punishment.

The Great Dismal Swamp covers southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Maroons began settling there in the late 1600s and continued living there well into the mid-19th century.