Topics Related to UNC-Chapel Hill

Morehead Planetarium trained NASA astronauts in celestial navigation for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab missions, 1960-75. Dome 450 ft. S.

Merchant. Left native Scotland, 1774. Partner in Transylvania Company; UNC trustee. Home 1/2 mi. E.; grave 2 blks. N.

Historian, professor, & founder of the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. Born 1/2 block W.

First state university to open its doors, 1795. Chartered in 1789 under the Constitution of 1776.

On December 4, 1994, Charlotte Smith, then a member of the UNC Tar Heels women’s basketball team, became the second collegiate women’s player ever to dunk. The first dunk had come nearly 10 years earlier when West Virginia University player Georgeann Wells accomplished the feat in a game against the University of Charleston.

On October 26, 1895, UNC fullback Joel Whitaker threw the first forward pass in football to his teammate George Stephens.The history-making throw happened in Atlanta where the Tar Heels were playing the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Whitaker was punting from the Carolina end zone and, to avoid the Georgia players charging him, tossed the ball forward. As luck would have it, Stephens was the one to catch the toss. It probably looked to many in the audience like the ball was knocked out of Whitaker’s hands and that the whole situation was an accident.

Football star Charlie "Choo Choo" Justice, native of Asheville, played for UNC 1946 to 1949 before going on to play for the Washington Football Team (formerly Washington Redskins). He was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 1963.

On March 29, 1982, UNC basketball Coach Dean Smith and his Tar Heels won the school’s first national title since 1957. The Tar Heels took on the Georgetown University Hoyas in New Orleans in final game in the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament that year.

On March 13, 1953, UNC-Chapel Hill students Carl Kasell and Charles Kuralt stepped up to the microphone for WUNC’s inaugural FM broadcast.After getting its start as a student-run AM station in the 1940s, the station made its transition to the FM band with future broadcasting greats Kasell and Kuralt. The station went on a six-year hiatus in 1970, after being taken off the air by technical difficulties and returned in 1976 as a professionally-run National Public Radio affiliate.

On February 12, 1795, Hinton James became the first student to enter the University of North Carolina. James, who had walked to Chapel Hill from his home in New Hanover County, was the only student for the first two weeks of the school year. Academically gifted, James helped organize the first literary club and debating society on campus. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree as one of the seven students in the university’s first graduating class in July 1798.