North Carolina

The Carolina colony's poorer half, without a good harbour, and consequently a place of small farms rather than great estates. The Outer Banks and their shifting shoals made deep-water ports impossible along most of the coast - the stretch is called the Graveyard of the Atlantic - so the colony never developed a Charleston, and settlement came overland from Virginia and down the wagon road from Pennsylvania rather than by sea. That produced a population of yeoman farmers, Scots-Irish and German in the backcountry, with a planter elite confined to the northeast. Blackbeard operated from these inlets and was killed at Ocracoke in 1718. The Regulator movement of the 1760s, a rising of backcountry farmers against corrupt eastern officials, was crushed at Alamance in 1771 and prefigured the revolution's internal divisions. Naval stores - tar, pitch and turpentine from the pine forests - were the colonial export and gave the state its nickname. It seceded last of the Confederate states and supplied more troops and more desertions than any other. Textiles, furniture and tobacco built the modern economy, and the Research Triangle replaced them from the 1960s. The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Greensboro's lunch counter sit-in began in 1960. Raleigh is the capital and Charlotte the largest city. The state runs from the Atlantic to the highest peak east of the Mississippi. Its universities at Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh form the Research Triangle. Charlotte is the second largest banking centre in the country. Barbecue there is vinegar-based and regionally contested.

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