Short answers, pulled from the story.
Naval Station Norfolk was established in 1917 as the United States prepared to enter World War I. It is the world's largest naval base, headquartered on Sewell's Point Peninsula, and hosts over 62,000 active-duty personnel, 75 ships, and 132 aircraft. It also serves as the North American headquarters for NATO's Allied Command Transformation.
Norfolk was bombarded by Lord Dunmore's naval forces in late 1775 after his defeat at the Battle of Great Bridge. On the 16th of January 1776, the Patriots' Fourth Virginia Convention agreed to burn most remaining homes to deny Dunmore a base. Only the walls of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church survived, and a cannonball fired by HMS Liverpool remains lodged in its wall today.
The epidemic began when the 183-foot vessel Benjamin Franklin docked in Hampton Roads after arriving from the West Indies, where yellow fever had been active. Despite an initial quarantine and a second inspection that found no issues, the disease spread through the city via mosquitoes and poor sanitation, killing roughly 3,200 people in Norfolk and Portsmouth by the time cooler weather ended the outbreak.
On the 1st of March 1980, Drs. Georgianna and Howard Jones opened the first in vitro fertilization clinic in the United States at Eastern Virginia Medical School. The country's first in-vitro test-tube baby was born there in December 1981.
Virginia adopted a policy of massive resistance, cutting off state funding for integrated schools. In 1958, Governor J. Lindsay Almond ordered Norfolk's schools closed after federal courts mandated integration. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled the closures unconstitutional, and in February 1959, seventeen black children entered six previously segregated Norfolk public schools. Virginian-Pilot editor Lenoir Chambers won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for his opposition to massive resistance.
Norfolk sits on low-lying land that is slowly subsiding, while climate change is causing surrounding sea levels to rise. Some areas already flood regularly at high tide. A 2012 city-commissioned study found that addressing a one-foot rise in sea level would cost around one billion dollars, and scientists at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science estimated in 2013 that the sea could rise by five and a half feet or more around Norfolk by the end of this century.