Sarah McCammon

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When Taylor Merendo moved to Bloomington, Ind., nearly two years ago, fleeing an abusive marriage, she needed help.

"I was six months pregnant and at that point in time, I really didn't have a stable place to live," Merendo says.

Under a clear sky on July 10, 2015, the Confederate flag that had flown on the South Carolina statehouse grounds since the Civil Rights era came down.

Updated 4:55 p.m. ET

Bad news for history nerds everywhere: Apparently it's not as popular as it used to be to visit living history museums like Colonial Williamsburg. The organization in eastern Virginia says it is cutting jobs and outsourcing multiple job categories in an effort to reduce hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

Support for same-sex marriage is growing — even among groups traditionally opposed to it — according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The report, based on a survey conducted earlier this month, suggests public opinion is shifting quickly, two years after the Supreme Court's Obergefell v.

Broken teeth are all too often a punchline in conversations about poor people in rural places. But for Heather Wallace, dental problems are anything but funny.

"Basically it's just like a nerve pain. Your whole body locks up; you have to stop for a second to try to breathe," she said. "And sometimes if it hurts bad enough, you might cry."

For his first commencement speech as president, Donald Trump went back to a place that was once key to his efforts as a candidate to shore up support among the Republican base.

Standing before tens of thousands of members of the Class of 2017 and their families at Liberty University's open-air stadium in Lynchburg, Va., Trump thanked the crowd for helping him achieve the presidency.

"I wanna thank you because, boy, did you come out and vote — those of you that are old enough; in other words, your parents," Trump said. "Boy, oh boy, you voted. You voted!"

When 60-year-old Owen Golay talks about the two Confederate flags he flies in his front yard, he sounds like many Southern defenders of such symbols.

"It stands for heritage; it's a part of our history," Golay said.

But it's not really his history. Golay lives in rural Pleasantville, Iowa, about 40 miles from where he was born. He still carries a small Confederate flag that his father gave him as a child. But aside from some people way back in his family tree who fought on both sides in the Civil War, he has no real ties to the South.

After high school, Staff Sgt. Kimi wanted to go to art school, but she didn't have the money. So she joined the military.

Intelligence analysts like Kimi work with drone pilots and others in the Air Force to guide decisions about where to deploy weapons in the fight against ISIS and al-Qaida. (The U.S. Air Force won't release her last name because of the high-security work she does).

A lot of teenage girls grow up looking to magazines like Seventeen or Teen Vogue for tips on fashion and dating. But for some conservative Christian girls and their parents, those magazines can seem a bit risqué. For about two decades starting in 1990, the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family offered an alternative: Brio magazine, which is making a comeback in May.

This weekend marks 10 years since the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history, at Virginia Tech.

Thirty-two people were killed and many others injured on April 16, 2007, on the campus in Blacksburg, Va. Still others witnessed the shooting and were physically unharmed, but carry psychological wounds that they've also spent the last decade recovering from.