Important things that literature can do, is a country something you think you know from an entirely different perspective and deepen the way you think about it. Im standing in the North Carolina room of the New Hanover County library were my brain Jennifer Dorn has pulled up some pieces that help tell the story of North Carolinas history. We are kind of unique as a special collections because special collections are usually kind of hard to access if you went to university or to a historical society, but because were in a public library, with open to anyone pick u if anyone wants to use our materials they just come in, we asked him to read over all rules and fill out a registration card and then they can use the materials. The North Carolina room is a realm and the new Hanover Public library where we focus on materials that have to do with North Carolina. There are books about biology, rivers, geography of North Carolina. Our special collections and archives room, the North Carolina rent is only at the main branch. We do have small North Carolina collections in some of the other libraries, some of our popular books about North Carolina and, of course, the ghost stories about wilmington and new hanover, we do those books because people like to read those in the check out a lot. At the special materials, the more oneofakind things are only here at this main branch. This question is what i find really interesting that we have here in the North Carolina room. It is part of the own very collection was donated to us from someone, a descendent of the family, and this is, the particular thing of interest, there are some civil war letters, theres information about the own family and governor john old was the governor of North Carolina, this was part of his, this was his family. Those are really interesting things, but there was a gentleman that was enslaved by the family, and his name was omar. This was in his words that he describes in his autobiography and after that hunter died he was purchased by another gentleman who did not treat him kindly and he ended up running away and made his way through fayetteville North Carolina where he was caught as a runaway slave and put in jail. They are the sheriff realized that he was a literate man because omar wrote on the walls of his jail in arabic and he contacted, the sheriff contacted don owens and let him know we had this gentleman who was a slave and would you be interested in talking to him. John owen decided to take omar so hes living with the owen family and they quickly realized how intelligent of a man he is. They invite other scholars to come speak with him in arabic and he has conversations with them and they said oh, hes one of the most well spoken gentleman that we talked to from that area and when we received a collection, there was some of his original writing. This was the journal of the daughter eliza. He wrote in her journal in arabic so there is still some of his writing that exists. This is particularly interesting because he was born around 1770 so this writing is probably from around 1830 and the family these and pass them along. There were a lot of lessons that sort of spread about him. A lot of people thought he was a prince so people called him prince morrow and from what i understand he didnt dissuade them from believing in these legends. Most people dont realize that wilmington does have a claim to fame with an expresident. Woodrow wilsons father was a presbyterian minister and he served at the First Presbyterian church here. When woodrow wilson, or tommy as he was known locally, came here it was around november 1874. He was Davidson College and became skilled, he was said to have been in ill health and they sent him here to rest and take a little time off so he was here until age 75. While here he had quite a few adventures. From this local newspaper, theres a great story here about how its believed that he had the first bicycle in wilmington and that he rode it into the river. I dont know if thats true or not but thats what was said and this is the kind of bicycle he would have owned. We also have a page where this is from my biography of him and he actually signed it and donated it to the library so we do have his signature. Now for something that is not so happy to talk about in wilmingtons history. Its actually a very sad part of our history, the coup day top of 1898 when the elected government was overthrown. Our library has had a collecon omaterials about 1898 for quite a while. They did preserve these photographs so they would be available and kept safe so what we have here are just a few images that ive pulled from the collection that sort of, the images speak for themselves. This image here is a photograph was taken during the berlin of the cherry hall. Interestingly, there are firemen in the crowd helping burn the building that this is the building where the daily record, which was the africanamerican newspaper that alex manley rented, the press was kept in this building and this is a photograph of the actual press for the daily record after it was burned. You can see how the building just burned around it. So the photographs that are a little more chilling are ones that mark where people were killed. So this portrait or photograph is where, this one was where a gentleman was killed and theres an ex right here, if you see, theres a description at the bottom and it says this is where a white man was killed during the coup detat and this photograph here is where two africanamerican gentmen were murdered. And theres two axes in this photograph as well. I think in North Carolina room like this is very important to the community because it gives easy access to the materials. I think people still, more and more so assume that you can find everything online and really, you cant. You really cant, especially when youre looking at archival materials, oneofakind materials. You cannot findthose things online so having this room here open all the hours that we are , people can come right in and asked us a question, we can answer it. We get all types of different questions and we do our best to find the answers for people. On the banks of the Cape Fear River in historic wilmington North Carolina. Coming up, we sit down with one wilmington author writes about government led effort to save thousands of vietnamese children before the fall of saigon in 1975. Operation baby lift was an evacuation of 2 to 3000 vietnamese displaced children from saigon at the very end of the war there in april 1975. The purpose of the baby lift was to remove from vietnam displaced children who were considered orphans and therefore in need of stable homes somewhere else and this was right at the time when