When was the last time Pennsylvania Avenue and Times Square and countless other locations across the country were packed with crowds at 1:00 in the morning following a presidential election? The same nation that elected George Bush by the hanging chads of 2000 has just given the presidency to someone who was relatively unknown at that time.

By the time The Speech of August 28, 2008 ended with an artful allusion to the March on Washington of August 28, 1963, the Democratic Convention had belatedly made a case for ending the rule of the Republicans.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick offered a curious contrast in his Democratic Convention speech earlier this week. He deemed Senator Barack Obama a man of vision and compared him to the policies and programs of the Bush administration.

Barack Obama cannot help that the election campaign until now has been mostly about him -- his background, his personality, his race, his politics, his oratory, his church, his newness, his inexperience, his family, his primary victories, his victory over Hillary and Bill Clinton, his rock star tour of Europe.

For more than 200 years there has been a chaplain in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.The current Senate chaplain is the Reverend Barry Black, the first African American and the first Seventh-day Adventist in the position. Kim Lawton reports.

Read more of Kim Lawton's interview with U.S. Senate chaplain Barry Black.

The story of a radical change in Minnesota's fifth congressional district in Minneapolis. A seat long-held by a Norwegian-American was taken over in the November 2006 election by an African American Muslim. This story aired prior to Ellison's victory.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the Mormons — barred African-Americans from full membership until 1978. Since then, the church has increased its outreach to African-American communities, but has yet to repudiate its old teachings that blacks were cursed by God as descendents of Cain or Ham.

"We know that we are rooted in Africa, but our sensibilities, our cultural and moral sensibilities, tend not to drive us to appeal for their liberation the same way that we have been driven to appeal for our own," says Rev. Sean McMillan.

"Dr. King liked jazz," says Rev. Michael Haynes of Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, who invited his brother, renowned jazz drummer Roy Haynes, to be part of a special musical service honoring King.