North Carolina's Cultural Titans

About this graphic

Twenty-six North Carolinians at 22 places, and the rule is where their influence happened, not where they were born. A birthplace map would have left out Michael Jordan (born in Brooklyn), Maya Angelou (St. Louis) and the Wright Brothers (Dayton), and a map of North Carolina icons without Jordan is wrong in a way no footnote repairs. So Jordan is in Wilmington, Angelou in Winston-Salem and the Wrights at Kitty Hawk. Two placements are deliberately narrow. Andrew Jackson is at Salisbury, where he read law, because his birthplace is disputed and he himself said S.C. Blackbeard is at Beaufort, where Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground, though Ocracoke and Bath have claims too.

Every portrait is freely licensed, 18 public domain and 8 Creative Commons, pulled from Wikimedia Commons with the license recorded for each². One is not a portrait at all: no likeness of Virginia Dare exists, so her circle is a 1937 postage stamp, a picture of a legend rather than a person. Dots are placed from the federal Geographic Names Information System¹, and the final layout was arranged by hand in an editor that keeps every dot locked to its true coordinate.