This collection profiles the people who helped shape life in North Carolina in the twentieth century. It includes 160 biographical sketches of Tar Heels who made a difference, highlighting their accomplishments in the areas of agriculture, the arts, business, education, law, media, politics, popular culture, public service, religion, social movements, and sports.

Some of those profiled are familiar because of their prominence in public life--Thomas Wolfe, John Hope Franklin, Doris Betts, Jesse Helms, Doc Watson, and Richard Petty, for example. Others are less well known today but...

Charlotte-based NationsBank, formerly named NCNB, became one of the nation's leading financial powers following its acquisition in 1988 of First Republic Bank of Texas and its merger in 1991 with Atlanta-based C&S/Sovran. The authors provide a corporate history of this maverick financial institution.

Terry Sanford (1917 1998) was one of the most important public figures of the postwar South. First as North Carolina s governor and later as president of Duke University, he demonstrated a dynamic style of progressive leadership marked by compassion and creativity. This book tells the story of Sanford s beginnings, his political aspirations, his experiences in office, and, of course, his numerous accomplishments in the context of a period of revolutionary change in the South.
After defeating a segregationist campaign in 1960 to win the governorship, Sanford used his years in office to...

The Good Government Man captures the life of Albert Coates (1896-1989), the founder and first director of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, and an exciting, transformative era in the history of UNC. Inspired by visionary President Edward Kidder Graham--whose death during the influenza pandemic of 1918 devastated the campus--Coates adopted as his life mission his hero's dream of the university in service to the state.

With raw determination, stubborn independence, and sheer audacity, Coates created the Institute of Government, now School of...

Henry E. Frye came of age just as the South was beginning a transformational change. When he graduated from college in 1953, African Americans like him could only hope that the future would be different from the past. At the close of his public career in 2001, he was chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court--the head of the state's third branch of government. Throughout their lives, Frye and his wife, Shirley, were in the vanguard of the advances that shaped the lives of African Americans. His election to the state legislature in 1968 was the beginning of steady, determined efforts...