The Old North State has a rich recorded history that has lasted approximately 450 years.
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Some revolutionary battles took place in the colonies before independence was declared on July 4, 1776. One of those was the February 27, 1776, battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge in Pender County, North Carolina.
The Halifax Resolves is the name later given to a resolution adopted by the Fourth Provincial Congress of the Province of North Carolina on April 12, 1776. The resolution was a forerunner of the United States Declaration of Independence.
The subject of Scottish folklore and myth, Flora MacDonald assisted Prince Charles Stuart in his escape from King George II during the Jacobite rebellion. In 1774, Flora and her family moved to the North Carolina colony, and Flora’s husband and son fought for the Loyalists during the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge. The Jacobite heroine returned to her native Scotland in 1779 where she died
Josiah Martin, the last royal governor of North Carolina, was born in Ireland in 1737. Due to his family's connection to the British crown, Martin replaced Governor Tryon in 1771 as royal governor of North Carolina. Martin assumed a difficult position because Patriot colonists in North Carolina had long resented overwhelming British taxation and the War of Regulation remained fresh in the colonists' minds.
First, there was the Halifax Resolves. Then there was the Declaration of Independence.
General Griffith Rutherford led a short but destructive march against the mountain-dwelling Cherokee in September 1776. Although casualties were relatively low on both sides, Rutherford’s army razed over thirty important Cherokee communities causing tribesmen and women to flee the mountains and start life anew elsewhere. Some historians claim that had the Cherokee recovered and fought with the British during the Revolutionary War, the conclusion may have been different.
Joseph Hewes is best known as one of North Carolina’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence. But he also played an important role in the creation of the U.S. Navy. In fact, a World War II transport ship, the U.S.S. Joseph Hewes, was named for him, and so was a frigate deployed in the...
On the eve of the American Revolution, the Vestry of St. Paul's Church in Edenton wrote "The Test," which helped fan the flames of independence within the colony of North Carolina.
A representative of North Carolina at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, William Hooper risked death and sacrificed his personal income to secure the creation of the United States. He later pursued a Federalist political ideology, which many North Carolinians disagreed with, and served as a federal judge until shortly before his death.
Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.
While Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” did not, of course, influence the crafting of the roughly contemporaneous Declaration of Independence, American Founders such as James Madison and John Adams soon became avid readers of the work.
The American Revolution was actually an epic sprawling across multiple decades, regions, peoples, and political factions.
Commentary
North Carolina’s Role in the Creation of the U.S. Forest Service
The story is complicated. In the United States in the late 1800s, demand for wood seemed insatiable—for houses, ships, fuel, and railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country.
Charles Cornwallis: One General Among Several
There's a lot to learn about General Charles Cornwallis, starting with the fact that he was never overall British commander during the American Revolution.
Second-to-the-Last in Freedom (for Women)
In 1971 the North Carolina legislature ratified an amendment to the U.S. Constitution giving equal voting rights to women. Not the Equal Rights Amendment! The Nineteenth Amendment of 1920.