See photos from the area of Wake, Chatham, and Lee counties profiled in 1939 in the WPA's "Guide to the Old North State".

The latest installment in The N&O's Old North State series, Warrenton fights to regain lost glory, allows us a chance to use the lovely sounding word, antebellum.

For the past few years, Birds of Avalon drummer Scott Nurkin has been working on a very cool art project on a wall of Pepper's Pizza in Chapel Hill -- the North Carolina Musicians Mural, which includes Kanapolis George Clinton and 16 other luminaries (with a dozen or so more still to come). There will be a story about this in Sunday's paper; meantime, check out our online photo gallery, which includes most of the portraits.

ADDENDUM (6/28/09): And here's the story.

A collection of photographs of people and places in the Great Smoky Mountains during the early 1900s.

View some of the work by local photographers included in the Portraits of Raleigh exhibit.

By Rob Christensen
In the 1890s, North Carolina underwent a pitchfork rebellion unlike anything ever seen in Southern politics.

By John David Smith
In April 1865, soon after Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Ralph Waldo
Emerson eulogized the recently slain president as "thoroughly American
-- a quite native, aboriginal man, as an acorn from an oak, no aping of
foreigners, no frivolous accomplishments." Seventeen years later, Walt
Whitman lauded Lincoln as the American among Americans, "his times, his
death -- great as any, any age -- belong altogether to our own."

By Lewis M. Steel
For generations, the North has given itself credit for being less racially biased than the South, and for being the better place for African- Americans to live.

By Gil Troy
William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan were the conservative revolution's odd couple. Buckley was the movement's elitist prophet, scolding Americans polysyllabically. Reagan was its populist preacher, inspiring millions to join him in repudiating "big government."

By Michael Kenny
The Boston Globe
In early January 1865, some three weeks after the Union Army entered Savannah at the sweeping end of Sherman's March to the Sea, some 500 black children marched through the city to the old slave market that had been hastily converted into a large schoolroom.