The date was August 5, 1965. Wernher von Braun, the world's most famous rocket expert, stands on the roof of a ten-story building at NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and looks south coward the Tennessee River. Two miles away, sealed in a concrete bunker with sixteen­inch-thick walls, a group of engineers peers through periscopes; meanwhile, other team members push buttons on the bunker's steel-gray consoles. As von Braun and the engineers watch, a continuous plume of flame biases from the base of a mammoth concrete structure several hundred yards from the bunker. Thunder roll. Smoke billows. For two and a half minutes hell unfolds. Alabama has become, as writer Bob Lionel lacer wrote, "the land of the Earth-shakers."
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The sound and fury generated that day resulted from the test-firing of the first stage of the Saturn moon rocket. Throughout the 1960s, Huntsvillians would hear and feel that roar many times as ASA scientists aimed for the goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961-- "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." Before the end of the decade, the goal would be reached, and on July 16, 1969, a mammoth rocket, stand­ing taller than the Statue of Liberty, would leave the launch pad in Florida carrying three human beings toward the surface of the moon.

In 1835 Daniel Pratt (1799–1873), a northerner from New Hampshire, told a coworker that he would soon establish a factory and manufacturing village in the South “for the purpose of dignifying labor, and to give the laboring class an opportunity of not only making an independent living, but to train up workmen who could give dignity to labor.” With a strict adherence to religion and education, Pratt hoped to imbue his southern community with what he believed to be positive New England virtues of sobriety, thrift, and hard work. Fundamental qualities such as these might then earn each individual “a neat, substantial dwelling, the front yard adorned with shrubbery and flowers, a good vegetable garden, a pleasant wife and cheerful children,” according to Pratt. Prattville, Alabama, which Pratt founded fourteen miles northwest of Montgomery in 1839, offered just such opportunities.

Booker Taliaferro Washington, the founder of Tuskegee University in Alabama, was asked to deliver the “Negro address” at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, an economic fair to celebrate the South’s attempts to join in American industrial growth. The thirty-nine-year-old had been born a slave in Virginia, the child of an illiterate slave mother and a white father who did not acknowledge him as son. As an adolescent in West Virginia, Washington struggled mightily to receive the rudiments of an education, because he understood schooling was the necessary prerequisite for him to rise in the world. He was born without a surname, but emblematic of his ambitions and patriotism, he named himself after the father of the country. He went penniless to Hampton Institute, where he graduated and in 1881 was recommended to white men in Tuskegee who wanted to establish a school for “colored youth.”

​A heart for service paved the way for Annie Wheeler to become the "Angel of Santiago." But before her fame, Annie Wheeler made a name for herself throughout Lawrence County for her adventurousness and devotion to family. However, her most endearing quality was her hopeful spirit, the one that led her around the world.