About North Carolina

North Carolina is a state of extraordinary contrasts and outsized historical consequence. Within its borders you find the second-largest banking center in the United States, one of the world's premier research and technology ecosystems, the oldest public university in the nation, the birthplace of powered flight, and the spark that ignited the modern Civil Rights Movement, all coexisting with a vast rural interior where sweet potato and hog farms spread across flat coastal plain land little changed from the 19th century, and mountain communities whose isolation has preserved cultures and crafts that disappeared elsewhere generations ago.

The state stretches 560 miles from the Atlantic coast to the Tennessee border, climbing from sea level at the Outer Banks to 6,684 feet at Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi River. Between those two extremes lie the Piedmont's urban crescent (Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh), the Research Triangle's world-class universities and laboratories, and the broad coastal plain that remains North Carolina's agricultural and demographic heartland even as the cities grow.

North Carolina's motto, Esse Quam Videri, To Be Rather Than To Seem, captures something real about the state's character. It has rarely been flashy or self-promoting. Its achievements tend to be structural: a research park conceived in the 1950s that took decades to mature, a banking law change in the 1980s that quietly allowed national expansion, a lunch counter sit-in in 1960 that students described as ordinary moral obligation. North Carolina has shaped America repeatedly by doing things rather than claiming to.