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00:00The South. It's home to the first permanent English settlement in America, four of the original thirteen colonies, and many legendary tales.
00:12It was here where 117 early settlers disappeared without a trace.
00:18A pirate named Blackbeard met his grisly fate, and two brothers first took to the air in the birthplace of flight.
00:28But the South is famous for its epic conflicts, too.
00:32It was here that Native Americans were taken from their land and forced into exile on a trail of tears.
00:39It was in fields of cotton that millions of enslaved Africans labored for centuries in the hot southern sun.
00:47All across the South, thousands of Civil War soldiers perished during the bloodiest conflict in American history.
00:55And it was in a small county courthouse that a jury acquitted two white men who were guilty of one of the nation's most horrific crimes.
01:04But the people of the South have always fought to overcome the odds.
01:09It was here that a Georgia preacher inspired millions in the battle for civil rights.
01:15It was here where a dazzling city rose again on the ashes of war, and is now a hip-hop capital of the nation in a region also known as the heart of country music.
01:26It's not hard to understand why Southerners feel such a deep connection to their land.
01:32When you peer down on their stunning gulf shores, soar across rivers that make you feel like you've entered an enchanted world,
01:40and climb to the top of high, rocky peaks that tower over one of the most fascinating regions in America, the South.
02:10The South is a place of many stories, but there's none as strange as the one that unfolded here, just inside North Carolina's Outer Banks at a place called Roanoke Island.
02:39It remains one of the greatest mysteries of the American South.
02:44In 1585, 107 English settlers were dropped off on this coast with a mission to establish England's first permanent settlement in America.
02:57A replica of the kind of ship they arrived on is now docked close to where they made their historic landing.
03:03But after they arrived, the men clashed with Native Americans and started running out of supplies.
03:09They were forced to flee back to England just one year later.
03:13In 1587, an even larger group of 117 men, women, and children tried again to make a go at settling Roanoke Island.
03:23And that's when the mystery started.
03:26Three years later, when a supply ship arrived here, those on board made a chilling discovery.
03:37The Roanoke settlers had completely vanished.
03:43All that remained was an earthwork fort that still stands here in the trees not far from the shore.
03:53They also discovered that someone had carved the word Croatoan into a wooden post, but they had no idea why.
04:02Artifacts from this and other early settlement sites in the region have suggested that some of the survivors might have joined Native American communities in order to survive.
04:15Why they didn't return to leave messages for those who might look for them remains a mystery that has never been solved.
04:33After the Roanoke colony's disappearance, the English weren't able to settle the South for another 20 years,
04:40until May 1607, when three more ships arrived off the coast of what's now Virginia.
04:50Those vessels, named Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery, carried 144 boys and men.
04:58They chose a settlement site far upriver for protection and named it Jamestown after their king.
05:06But Native Americans attacked the settlers almost as soon as they arrived, and so they built a triangular-shaped fort, which is now outlined with a wooden fence.
05:17The biggest threats to settlers in Jamestown ended up being dysentery, salt poisoning, typhoid, and famine.
05:25Within five months, half of them were dead, most from starvation.
05:31That period of the Jamestown colony came to be known as the Starving Time.
05:38But enough settlers survived to make Jamestown the first permanent English settlement in America, founded more than a decade before the Pilgrims made their famous landing in Plymouth.
05:51At the time, eastern Virginia was home to at least 13,000 Native Americans.
05:57They lived up and down the surrounding coast in simple huts similar to these replicas in historic Jamestown.
06:04The tribes here were all ruled by a single chief named Powhatan.
06:09Without his offerings of food, many more of the Jamestown settlers would likely have starved.
06:15But when those settlers then started to demand more food and raided Indian villages to get it, conflicts with the Indians flared.
06:23They captured Powhatan's favorite daughter, Pocahontas, and used her as a bargaining chip to force the chief to return English prisoners and weapons.
06:32She ended up marrying one of the members of the colony, John Rolfe, but died in England a few years later when she was only about 21 years old.
06:44Jamestown is not only important as the first permanent English settlement in America,
06:50it was also here where the unique economy, plantation culture, and slave history of the American South were born, thanks to a wide leafy plant called tobacco.
07:02At the time, King James I himself believed tobacco was loathsome to the eye, harmful to the brain, and dangerous to the lungs.
07:12But since worldwide demand for tobacco was on the rise, he founded the Shirley Plantation here in Charles City, Virginia, in 1613,
07:20and helped make tobacco Virginia's biggest cash crop and number one export.
07:27It also proved to English investors that fortunes could be made from southern plantations, if they could find the labor to grow the crops.
07:35It was in 1640 that the Shirley Plantation and others began to embrace slavery as a path to profit.
07:43Because of tobacco and the cheap labor of enslaved African men and women, the Southern Plantation was born.
07:52Today, four centuries later, tobacco still plays a big role in the economy of the South, especially in North Carolina, where it remains the state's top crop.
08:04Starting in the 1880s, the city of Durham became the heart of the cigarette industry.
08:10Its hometown baseball team was even called the Tobacconists, until it was renamed the Durham Bulls after a leading cigarette brand.
08:19The snorting bull sign that towers over the field is a copy of the one featured in the 1988 Kevin Costner hit movie Bull Durham, in which Costner plays a talented catcher.
08:30In 1924, Durham's Trinity College was renamed Duke University after its largest benefactor, the Duke family, major shareholders of the American Tobacco Company.
08:43Today, this campus is considered one of the top universities in the nation.
08:49It's also home to one of the hottest rivalries in American sports.
08:54It's here in the Cameron Indoor Stadium that Duke's Blue Devils basketball team face off every year against the University of North Carolina's Tar Heels, just as they've been doing since 1920.
09:06Both teams have five NCAA championship wins, but in their regular season play, the Tar Heels have won more than half the games they've played against the Blue Devils.
09:16One reason that the Carolina-Duke rivalry is so fierce is because UNC lies just down the road in nearby Chapel Hill.
09:25It was here in UNC's Carmichael Auditorium that a young Michael Jordan played for the Tar Heels in 1981 on a basketball scholarship.
09:35During that first season, he was named Freshman Player of the Year and helped lead the Tar Heels to the championship.
09:41During that first season, he was named Freshman Player of the Year and helped lead the Tar Heels to an NCAA championship win.
09:48Jordan's mentor was UNC's coaching legend, Dean Smith.
09:53But Jordan left UNC in 1984 after he was drafted by the Chicago Bulls, before he'd even graduated.
09:59UNC is part of what's known as the Research Triangle, a region shaped by three universities, UNC in Chapel Hill, Duke in Durham, and North Carolina State in nearby Raleigh.
10:17At its heart is Research Triangle Park, a vast campus that's home to many of the top high-tech companies in the world.
10:24From lighting giant Cree, a leader in LED light bulbs, to German chemical company BASF, which uses its greenhouses here to develop genetically modified crops like corn.
10:38Research Triangle Park was started in 1959 to try and keep talented scientists and engineers from leaving the South for jobs in Northeast cities like New York and Boston.
10:49It's part of what now drives the growing high-tech economy of the South, and what's caused more Americans to migrate here than to any other region of the country.
11:01Fly across the Southern United States, and it can seem like there's no end to the rich geographic diversity of the South.
11:11But there are just as many different ways that people here define what it means to them to be a Southerner.
11:19For many, it's a close connection to the land that dates back generations.
11:25Or the experience of living close to the ever-shifting Mississippi River.
11:31For others, it's keeping the ancient traditions of their ancestors alive.
11:36Or perhaps, just the pleasure of fishing on a favorite river.
11:41In the end, most Southerners would probably agree that being a Southerner is really just a state of mind.
11:49Especially since there's no one way to define the South as a region.
11:59For the United States Census Bureau, the South is a geographic region that covers 16 states,
12:06stretching from Delaware in the Northeast, all the way down to Florida, and west to Texas and Oklahoma.
12:13But some historians exclude Oklahoma and include Missouri in their maps of the South,
12:19since they treat the region as the 15 states where slavery was practiced prior to the Civil War.
12:25Today, most people think of the South as the 11 states that seceded from the Union, a region also referred to simply as Dixie.
12:36But there are also many possible subdivisions within the Southern states.
12:43Places where cotton was once king, like Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana, are often called the Deep South.
12:53The states that line the Gulf of Mexico, including Texas, are sometimes called the Gulf South.
13:00And then there are the South Atlantic states that run down the Atlantic coast from Delaware to Florida.
13:07It's along this coast that lies a series of long, narrow barrier islands, known as North Carolina's Outer Banks.
13:22They were created by receding glaciers roughly 18,000 years ago.
13:29Today, they are home to the first national seashore in the nation.
13:33The 30,000-acre Cape Hatteras National Seashore has been open to the public since 1953.
13:41But the peaceful beauty of the Outer Banks belies the dangers that lurk just offshore.
13:50The waters off this coast have been called the Graveyard of the Atlantic due to a treacherous sandbar known as Diamond Shoals
13:58that extends more than nine miles out to sea.
14:02The shoals and powerful currents are believed to have sunk more than 1,000 vessels here over the years.
14:09But in the 1700s, pirates, not sandbars, were what many sailors along this coast feared the most, especially one named Blackbeard.
14:20Just south of Cape Hatteras Island lies the Oak River.
14:25Just south of Cape Hatteras Island lies the Ocracoke Inlet.
14:30It provides a way for ships to pass through the barrier islands into Pamlico Sound.
14:36In the 18th century, this was one of the busiest waterways in the south.
14:42It's why one of America's most notorious outlaws, a pirate named Blackbeard, is said to have hit out just inside the Ocracoke Inlet to plunder ships that passed by.
14:55For 18th century sailors, one of the most terrifying sights on the horizon was a ship full of buccaneers.
15:03Today, a two-thirds scaled replica of a 17th century pirate ship still plies these very same waters.
15:12After pulling up alongside the vessels he wanted to raid, Blackbeard and his fellow pirates often fired on them with cannons before leaping on board.
15:21There was a good reason that Blackbeard knew these waters well.
15:26He is said to have received protection from North Carolina's governor for a share of the treasure from his raids.
15:33Both men lived here in the nearby town of Bath on the Pamlico River.
15:38Blackbeard's house is said to have stood at a spot called Plum Point, a perfect place to keep an eye out for pirate hunters.
15:51Hunters like the one that finally captured Blackbeard, right here in North Carolina.
15:57It was just off the shores of Ocracoke Island in 1718 that a Royal Navy captain killed the legendary pirate after luring him into an ambush.
16:06Then, he cut off his head, mounted it to the bow of the ship, and dumped the rest of his body into Pamlico Sound.
16:14The legend goes that Blackbeard's ghost still roams Ocracoke Island, searching for his long lost head.
16:28Right up until the end of the 19th century, the barrier islands of southern states like North Carolina were pretty much uninhabited.
16:36There was little here but sand, wind, and wide open skies.
16:41And that's exactly why the South came to be home to the birthplace of flight.
16:48In 1900, two bicycle shop owners from Dayton, Ohio, named Wilbur and Orville Wright, came to North Carolina's windy coast to learn to fly.
16:58They returned every year to launch their gliders off the top of a giant sand dune called Big Kill Devil Hill, as they tried to come up with a design for an engine-powered airplane.
17:11They tinkered in simple wooden sheds, which have since been reconstructed.
17:19They were finally prepared to test their new engine-powered aircraft in the winter of 1903.
17:26On December 17th, they slid their invention out of the hangar on its skids, since it didn't have wheels.
17:32After a coin toss, Orville buckled himself into the pilot's seat.
17:37The engine started, and he and the flyer edged forward.
17:4127 mile-per-hour headwinds helped give them lift.
17:47And then, amazingly, they were airborne.
17:51For 12 incredible seconds, Orville kept the Wright flyer aloft for a distance of 120 feet, to the place where this number-one flight took off.
18:02The number-one marker now stands.
18:05By the time he touched down, the Wright brothers had made history.
18:09It was the first time that an engine-powered flying machine, heavier than air, had succeeded in a sustained and controlled flight.
18:18That same day, the Wright brothers took turns at the controls and flew greater and greater distances, each of which is marked by a different stone block at the base of Big Kill Devil Hill.
18:29In the fourth and last of those flights, it was Wilbur who flew the furthest, landing 852 feet away from where he had lifted off.
18:39Today, a towering 60-foot-high monument to the Wright brothers stands tall here, as a celebration of their conquest of the air.
18:48The Wright brothers went on to refine and market their airplane.
18:52It was sold as the Wright B Flyer, replicas of which still take to the skies today.
18:58Their original flyer was made from wood.
19:01This one is made out of steel, but is a nearly exact copy of the Wright B Flyer that was once the first commercially-produced airplane in the United States.
19:11It is a nearly exact copy of the Wright B Flyer that was once the first commercially-produced airplane in the world.
19:19The American South was the birthplace of flight.
19:23Today, it's a major hub for America's modern aviation industry.
19:28This is Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
19:33In 2014, it was the busiest airport in the world.
19:37Ninety-six million passengers arrived and departed from here in just one year.
19:45It's part of the transformation of the South over the last century, from a region once dominated by agriculture to one now driven by industry.
19:56Here at the Port of Charleston, BMWs are perfectly lined up and ready for export.
20:02These X5 models were all manufactured in nearby Greer, South Carolina, and will be shipped out from Charleston to 140 countries around the world.
20:12BMW is just one of a number of car companies that have recently set up shop in the South.
20:18Mercedes-Benz now produces close to 200,000 cars a year, here at its plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
20:25While in nearby Mississippi, Nissan has already built more than 3 million cars to be sold all across the country.
20:33These car makers have helped turn the South into the fastest-growing industrialized region of the nation.
20:39They've also fueled a wide range of other major industries, like this vast new steel plant in southern Alabama.
20:46It was originally built by the German company ThyssenKrupp at a cost of nearly $5 billion.
20:51Its unique look was created by a German color designer who wanted the plant to harmonize with the landscape, instead of looking like a giant industrial eyesore.
21:01Color, he insisted, should be music for the eye.
21:06Today, the economies of many southern states have been transformed by the arrival of new industries, just as many southern cities have been by the creation of modern engineering marvels.
21:18Soar across Charleston, South Carolina, and you discover one of the modern wonders of the South, the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, which spans the Cooper River.
21:30Today, highways leap across southern waterways, but once the rivers themselves served as key transportation routes, they are how English colonists and plantation owners got their crops to market.
21:41Southern plantations like this one, called Boone Hall outside Charleston, were often built next to rivers.
21:48They even had their own docks and waterside warehouses.
21:52Waterways helped fuel the explosion of the plantation economy, which grew rapidly after the arrival of the Jamestown settlers in the early 17th century and spurred other English investors to found other colonies in the American South.
22:06By 1712, there were four British colonies in the American South, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
22:16In 1733, King George II granted a charter for a new colony, called Georgia, that would act as a buffer between South Carolina and Florida, which was under Spanish control.
22:28Soon after, 120 hopeful settlers arrived here, on the banks of the Savannah River, to settle the last of Britain's 13 American colonies.
22:41Their leader, an English general named James Oglethorpe, quickly made friends with a local Indian chief named Tomochichi, who granted him the land that would ultimately become one of the jewels of the South.
22:55The city of Savannah.
22:59Oglethorpe had great visions for the new settlement, and he carefully laid out Savannah as a grid, with residential and commercial blocks built around city squares and parks.
23:11It's what made Savannah the very green city it is today.
23:14During the Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground, but decided that Savannah would be spared.
23:24He sent a message to President Lincoln, telling him,
23:27I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah.
23:31One reason there are so many steeples in Savannah is because the original plan made space for churches close to every city square.
23:40One of those owes its origins to a freed African-American slave named George Lyle.
23:47In 1773, he was given the opportunity to build a church in the city.
23:51One of those owes its origins to a freed African-American slave named George Lyle.
23:58In 1773, he was given a license to preach in the slave quarters of the plantations that line the Savannah River.
24:05His congregation was the start of the first black Baptist church in America.
24:11In the 1850s, enslaved Africans funded the building of Savannah's first African Baptist church.
24:16With savings, many of them could have used instead to gain their own individual freedom.
24:23Today, old cotton warehouses still line the waterfront of this southern city.
24:29They date from a time when Savannah was one of the biggest exporters of cotton in the world.
24:34The settlement of Georgia was like that of the other British colonies in the South.
24:39They started out in port cities like Savannah,
24:41and then expanded westward as wealthy investors cleared the land to create their vast plantations,
24:48and poorer settlers carved out their own small farms on the mountainous frontier.
24:58It's still possible to imagine what vast stretches of the American South were like before Europeans arrived.
25:05When you soar across the Cherokee National Forest on North Carolina's border with Tennessee.
25:16For thousands of years, these mountains were home to the Cherokee.
25:22But they were just a small piece of their vast nation, which covered 40,000 square miles here in the Appalachian Mountains.
25:29In 1819, as more and more Americans started encroaching on Indian land,
25:35the U.S. government signed a treaty that guaranteed that Cherokee land would be off-limits to white settlers forever.
25:43It clearly stated,
25:45all white people who have intruded or may hereafter intrude on the lands reserved for the Cherokees shall be removed by the United States.
25:55Confident that the U.S. government now recognized its sovereignty over its own lands,
26:01the Cherokee Nation proceeded to build itself a new capital in 1825, here in what's known as New Echota, Georgia.
26:09It had its own courthouse, council house, and post office,
26:14and even space for the first Indian language newspaper office in the nation.
26:19The buildings that stand here today are reconstructions of the originals,
26:24because within just a few years, there were no Cherokee left here.
26:28In 1828, just three years after the Cherokee capital was built,
26:33white trespassers discovered gold in the rivers of what's now Lumpkin County, Georgia.
26:40When word got out, thousands of hopeful prospectors began flooding onto Cherokee land
26:45to search for treasure, and the U.S. government did nothing to stop them,
26:50despite the promises it had made in its treaties.
26:54The government even built a brand new U.S. mint here in the middle of the town of Dahlonega,
27:00which turned it into a boomtown.
27:04Today, the administration building of the University of North Georgia stands on the site of the former mint,
27:10with a spire covered in gold leaf as a reminder of this town's gold rush history.
27:17In 1829, the same year that gold was discovered, Andrew Jackson was elected U.S. president.
27:24He believed that Native Americans were savages and had no rights to their land,
27:30and began proceedings to remove the Cherokee from the southern states to clear the way for white settlement.
27:35The next year, he signed the 1830 Indian Removal Act,
27:40which set in motion one of the most brutal actions ever taken by the U.S. government.
27:46Thousands of Native Americans were pulled from their homes in Georgia and other states across the South.
27:52Many were shackled in chains and forced to walk, at gunpoint, more than 1,000 miles west,
27:59on a series of routes that all led to Oklahoma.
28:02Up to a third of the 15,000 Cherokee who were forced to make the journey died on the way,
28:08which is one reason that journey came to be known as the Trail of Tears.
28:17In September 1836, a leading member of the Cherokee Nation, John Ross,
28:23wrote to the U.S. Congress to protest the removals.
28:25John Ross wrote to the U.S. Congress to protest the removals.
28:29We are stripped of every attribute of freedom.
28:32Our property may be plundered before our eyes.
28:35We have neither land, nor home, nor resting place that can be called our own.
28:41Our hearts are sickened.
28:45By the time this forced resettlement was over, 25 million acres of land
28:49that had belonged to the Cherokee and other tribes, including the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole Nations,
28:56was now opened up for white settlement.
28:59But some Cherokee had hidden in the forests to escape the U.S. forces.
29:05Others fled once they had reached Oklahoma and returned here to the lands where their ancestors were buried.
29:20Their descendants are known today as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians
29:26and live here on sovereign Indian land in Cherokee, North Carolina.
29:35Today, young Cherokee here at the local high school learn the language of their forebearers.
29:42A vast stretch of their tribe's former land, right next to the creek,
29:46and a vast stretch of their tribe's former land, right next to town,
29:50is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited national park in the nation.
30:02In the years that followed the Indian Removal Act, the economy of the South boomed,
30:08thanks in large part to the success of one crop called King Cotton,
30:12for which many Southerners would soon be willing to go to war.
30:18By the mid-1800s, Southern plantations, which depended on the labor of enslaved Africans,
30:25had made the United States the biggest cotton producer in the world.
30:29One historian from the time wrote that cotton was the foundation of the Southern economy,
30:34while slavery was its cornerstone.
30:36So when Abraham Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860, and promised to outlaw slavery,
30:43many in the South saw it as a direct assault on their economy
30:47and feared it would bring an end to their centuries-old agrarian way of life.
30:51On December 24, 1860, lawmakers here in Columbia, the South Carolina state capital,
30:58voted unanimously for South Carolina to secede from the federal union.
31:02Within weeks, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas also seceded.
31:09They signed a new constitution that made clear that owning slaves would remain a legal right
31:16in the states of their new confederacy.
31:19When South Carolina seceded, Union troops were in command of Fort Moultrie,
31:24guarding the entrance of Charleston Harbor.
31:27But the Union commander, Major Robert Anderson,
31:30feared he and his men would now come under attack by the secessionists.
31:34So they lowered their stars in the sky,
31:37and set out to conquer the United States.
31:40But the Union troops were defeated,
31:42Major Anderson feared he and his men would now come under attack by the secessionists.
31:47So they lowered their stars and stripes and moved to Fort Sumter,
31:51which lies on an island in the middle of Charleston Harbor.
31:54Anderson had thought its thick walls would provide better protection,
31:59but he was soon cut off by Confederate forces.
32:04Four months later, Anderson and his men were nearly out of food,
32:08but they refused a final demand to surrender.
32:12On April 12th at 4.30am, the Confederates lay siege to Fort Sumter.
32:18They were the first shots fired of the Civil War.
32:23The terrifying barrage continued for 34 hours.
32:29According to one of the Union soldiers, walls fell, fires burned, and pandemonium raged.
32:37But amazingly, no Union soldiers died in the assault.
32:42On April 13th, one day later, Anderson finally did surrender.
32:48His men lowered their now tattered stars and stripes,
32:52and retreated to the safety of Union ships offshore.
33:05Soon after the Battle of Fort Sumter, four more states seceded from the Union.
33:09Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and North Carolina.
33:14In May 1861, the new Confederate government decided to make Richmond, Virginia its new capital,
33:22which it remained throughout the war.
33:25The President of the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis,
33:29soon took up residence in this former private home downtown
33:33that was given the name the White House of the Confederacy.
33:40Richmond was chosen as the site for the Confederate capital
33:44because Virginia was the most populated and most industrialized state in the South at the time.
33:50It was able to provide the weapons that the Confederate Army needed,
33:55thanks to the Tredegar Ironworks, whose buildings still stand here on the banks of the James River.
34:02This foundry would become the biggest supplier of artillery to the Confederate Army,
34:06almost 1,100 cannons would be forged here,
34:10and shipped out to defend the Confederate forces from Union attacks.
34:14The first of those attacks took place right here in Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C.
34:24On July 16, 1861, 35,000 volunteers and other troops set out from Washington to try and seize Richmond.
34:32Little did they know that they would soon be fighting for their lives.
34:37The Battle of Bull Run, also called the Battle of First Manassas,
34:42was named after the Bull Run Creek that winds through Manassas, Virginia.
34:46It was around this creek that the Confederate Army had gathered to stop the Union advance.
34:52But the fighting that followed came to a head here, at this hill surrounding Henry House.
34:58The Southerners quickly overpowered the Federal troops and forced them into retreat.
35:06The Battle of First Manassas was the first evidence of the toll the war would take on civilians caught in the middle.
35:14As the two armies had fought for control of Henry Hill,
35:18an aging woman named Judith Henry lay bedridden inside her family home.
35:22After Confederate snipers took up positions inside the farmhouse,
35:26a Union cannon shell ripped it to pieces and injured Judith Henry so badly that she soon died in her daughter's arms.
35:34She was the first civilian casualty of the war.
35:42Historians still don't know exactly how many civilians died during the Civil War,
35:46but a recent study has found that as many as 750,000 soldiers may have lost their lives,
35:52which is more Americans than have died in all other conflicts in U.S. history combined.
35:59Thousands perished from gunfire and hand-to-hand combat at the Battle of Rissaka in Georgia in 1864,
36:07which is reenacted every year.
36:10But the majority of those killed were American soldiers.
36:14But the majority of all Civil War fatalities didn't happen on the battlefield.
36:20Wounded soldiers often perished from simple injuries and infections they incurred in battle,
36:26for which there were not yet cures.
36:29And then there were the thousands more who died at a place called Andersonville.
36:35This piece of ground in Georgia was not a battlefield,
36:39but was the site of some of the war's most horrific suffering.
36:44By 1863, the Confederate Army had captured so many Union soldiers,
36:50it was running out of space to hold them.
36:53So, they built this 26.5-acre stockade in a remote part of Georgia
36:58They built this 26.5-acre stockade in a remote part of Georgia
37:03that was not likely to be raided by the Union Army.
37:08It was named for the nearby village of Andersonville,
37:11located on a major rail line,
37:13which was used to transport thousands of captured Union soldiers to the nearby camp.
37:20The stockade was designed for 10,000 prisoners,
37:23but soon there were more than 30,000 inside its walls.
37:28Due to severe overcrowding, diseases spread like wildfire.
37:33Food was scarce.
37:35Every day, more prisoners arrived through its gates.
37:40One Union soldier later wrote,
37:42As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror.
37:47Stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons,
37:51covered with filth and vermin.
37:54Fifteen-foot-high walls surrounded the entire camp.
37:58Prisoners who got too close to the perimeter were shot dead.
38:02Without adequate shelter, the men here built their own lean-tos,
38:06teepees, huts, and even dug holes in the ground for protection,
38:10with whatever they could find.
38:12In the hot Georgia summer sun,
38:14some of the parched Union prisoners got down on their knees
38:18and started praying for water.
38:20Not long afterwards,
38:22water suddenly appeared from a spring inside the walls of the camp.
38:29Convinced that their prayers had been answered,
38:32prisoners named the source Providence Spring.
38:36Today, water from that same spring still flows through Andersonville.
38:43But while Providence Spring may appear to be the source of water,
38:47but while Providence Spring may have provided hope to men in the camp,
38:51it didn't save the lives of the nearly 13,000 soldiers who died here,
38:56many from untreated injuries incurred during battle.
39:01Their naked bodies, up to a hundred a day,
39:04were carted off in wagons across the fields of Andersonville
39:08and buried in shallow trenches.
39:10When the camp was finally liberated in May 1865,
39:14many of the prisoners were little more than skin and bones.
39:19After the war was over,
39:21the commandant of Andersonville, Major Henry Wurtz,
39:25was convicted of war crimes and hanged.
39:28Monuments now stand on the site
39:31in memory of the dead of the different Union states.
39:34Andersonville's graveyard is now a national cemetery
39:38to honor those who perished in what was the worst prisoner of war camp
39:43on either side of the Civil War.
40:04By the time the war ended, much of the South was in ruins.
40:10Entire cities had been burned to the ground or heavily damaged,
40:15farms abandoned,
40:17and basic infrastructure like bridges and rail lines destroyed.
40:22All this devastation had brought an end to slavery in America.
40:27It also brought hope to millions of former slaves in the South
40:31who were now free.
40:33In the period that followed, known as Reconstruction,
40:37amendments to the U.S. Constitution guaranteed African Americans
40:40citizenship, equality, and the right to vote.
40:44But many whites in the South refused to accept blacks as equals.
40:49Their efforts would force African Americans to spend more than a century
40:53fighting to secure their most basic freedoms.
40:56Fly across the South today, and you can still discover the places
41:00that were key turning points in that struggle.
41:03It was here at Stone Mountain in Georgia,
41:06now famous for its massive and controversial Confederate memorial,
41:10that the white supremacist organization, the Ku Klux Klan,
41:14gathered in 1915 to declare its rebirth by burning a cross on the summit.
41:21In the years that followed,
41:23millions of Southerners and others joined the Klan,
41:26which waged campaigns of terror against African Americans.
41:31The Klan's goal was to destroy what it called
41:34the rising tide of color in America.
41:41African Americans were threatened with intimidation and violence
41:44all across the South, from major cities to small towns.
41:48Towns like this one, known as Money, Mississippi.
41:53Drive through Money today, and it would be easy to pass
41:56right by this now-abandoned corner store,
41:59which is a key site in the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
42:03In 1955, a 14-year-old African American boy named Emmett Till
42:09came to the store to buy bubblegum with his friends,
42:12but was then accused of trying to flirt with the store owner's wife as he left.
42:15A few nights later, young Emmett was kidnapped at gunpoint,
42:19brutally beaten, and then shot to death,
42:22his battered and disfigured body thrown into the Tallahatchie River.
42:27Two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam,
42:31were acquitted of the crime by an all-male, all-white jury
42:35here at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse.
42:38Later, after being paid $4,000 for their story via mail,
42:41Later, after being paid $4,000 for their story via magazine,
42:46they admitted and even boasted how they had carried out the killing,
42:50but they were never called to account for the murder.
42:56The constant threat of violence and the enforcement of discriminatory Jim Crow laws
43:01did not succeed in stopping African Americans from organizing to fight for their rights.
43:06Almost 100 days after Till's death, in downtown Montgomery, Alabama,
43:11a 42-year-old seamstress named Rosa Parks
43:15refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man.
43:19Her arrest in 1955 inspired the famous and successful Montgomery Bus Boycott,
43:25a major turning point in the civil rights movement.
43:29And it was here, in Selma, Alabama, in 1965,
43:32that a wave of civil rights protests came to a head on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
43:38On that day, 600 African Americans had begun to march to the state capitol in Montgomery
43:44to try and secure their right to vote.
43:47But as they started to cross the bridge, state and local police savagely attacked the marchers
43:52with tear gas, billy clubs, and bull whips.
43:55Just two weeks later, a young Martin Luther King Jr.
43:58led another, much larger march to Montgomery
44:02and declared upon his arrival here at the statehouse,
44:05all the world today knows that we are here
44:08and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying,
44:12we ain't gonna let nobody turn us around.
44:15It was those marches and speeches that pushed President Lyndon B. Johnson
44:20to sign the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act into law.
44:24The trail of the civil rights movement winds its way all across the South,
44:29but for many, there's no place on this trail as powerful
44:32as a neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia, known as Sweet Auburn.
44:38It was in this simple brown and yellow house that Martin Luther King Jr. was born
44:43on January 15th, 1929, in an upstairs room.
44:49King learned to preach just down the street.
44:51at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where his father,
44:54Martin Luther King Sr., was pastor.
44:57He delivered his first sermon inside the church in 1947
45:01and was still a co-pastor here when he was assassinated
45:04in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968.
45:07Today, the Ebenezer Church is part of the larger
45:11Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.
45:16It's here where the civil rights leader and his wife, Coretta Smith,
45:19where the civil rights leader and his wife, Coretta Scott King,
45:22are buried together, in a crypt which is engraved with the words,
45:26Free at last. Free at last.
45:29Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.
45:37Martin Luther King Jr. lived to see the beginning of the great transformation
45:42of his hometown of Atlanta into a city that many now call the capital of the South.
45:46The modern city that stands here today ultimately rose from the ashes of the Civil War.
45:53During the war, Atlanta served as a key railway hub for Confederate troops and supplies,
45:59which is why it was burned to the ground by the Union Army.
46:03After the war, it was also the railway that fueled the city's recovery.
46:09Every day, trains arrived, carrying unemployed workers from across the southern states.
46:14Atlanta was hailed as the heart of what boosters called the New South,
46:20which they hoped would be driven primarily by industry, not agriculture.
46:26But while Atlanta boomed, segregation and Jim Crow laws drove many African Americans away
46:33for better opportunities in the industrial boom towns of the North,
46:37like Detroit and Chicago, during what's known as the Great Migration.
46:42But in 1973, just five years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death,
46:48Atlanta voted in its first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, who was the great grandson of slaves.
46:54During Jackson's three terms in office, talented and aspiring African Americans flocked to Atlanta,
47:00where they now believed anything was possible.
47:04In 1980, Ted Turner boosted Atlanta's prestige
47:08when he created the world's first 24-hour news channel, CNN.
47:13And in 1996, Atlanta was the proud host of the Summer Olympics.
47:22But even though corporate towers define its skyline,
47:26it also has one of the most attractive alternative art and theater scenes of any southern city.
47:31Much of it is centered here, in the little Five Points district, east of town.
47:35Atlanta has also become a capital of hip-hop.
47:39It was at a Tri-Cities High School outside town where two students,
47:43best known by their stage names, Big Boy and Andre 3000,
47:47first met and teamed up to create the hip-hop duo OutKast.
47:52Their Stankonia Studios, here on the north side of town,
47:56has lured hip-hop talent from across the nation,
47:59as well as other major Atlanta musicians, including Killer Mike,
48:02Ludacris, and Usher.
48:05Atlanta is just one place where the people of the south have carved out unique identities
48:11and proven that there's no single definition of what it means to be a southerner.
48:21And that's also the case here in the music city, Nashville, Tennessee.
48:26In the 1800s, Nashville, here on the banks of the Cumberland River,
48:30was known as a center for music publishing.
48:33But it didn't become Music City until November 28, 1925,
48:38when the Grand Ole Opry debuted its weekly radio show.
48:42It was initially called the WSM Barn Dance, after the station's name.
48:47In 1943, the wildly popular country and western broadcast
48:52moved to the city's Ryman Auditorium,
48:55a venue that's been called the mother church of country music.
48:59Thanks to the Grand Ole Opry, many famous country stars got their start in Nashville,
49:04including Dolly Parton, Hank Williams Sr., Loretta Lynn, and Earl Scruggs.
49:10Many other musicians have flocked here ever since, hoping to get their big break,
49:15while music lovers come to hear the latest talent.
49:20Bars and clubs crowd Music Row, which remains the heart of Nashville's music scene.
49:25But the city hasn't just been a place for live performance.
49:29It's also the home to one of the nation's most legendary recording studios.
49:33In the 1960s, RCA Victor Records built a new studio here,
49:38a few blocks away from Music Row,
49:41to take advantage of all the talent passing through Nashville.
49:44Called Studio B, it was managed by country music great Chet Atkins,
49:49who recorded everyone from Elvis Presley to the Everly Brothers.
49:52This legendary studio is now owned by Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame,
49:58which stands nearby with windows designed to look like piano keys.
50:05Music is just one of the many ways that people in the South express their southernness
50:11and have responded to the great changes that have swept across their land.
50:15From the days when America was first founded,
50:18to battles of the Civil War,
50:19and victories for civil rights,
50:22it's a region rich with the history of the nation,
50:26where freedom still beckons and many come to reach for the sky.
50:31There's simply no other place like the American South.
50:49you