Georgia

Overview: Here is a brief, balanced, and up-to-date history of Georgia from the early Native Americans into the twenty-first century. Based on the most recent research, this second edition surveys the people and events that shaped our state's history in a style that reads easily and flows effortlessly. Beginning with the earliest Native American settlements, the story tells of first contacts between area natives and Spanish from Florida, British from Carolina, and James Oglethorpe leading the effort to found a colony called Georgia. That colony passed out of the British Empire during the American Revolution, a conflict that was as much a civil war as a war for independence. In the following decades, the Creek and Cherokee were driven out as Georgia was transformed into a cotton kingdom dominated by a minority of slaveholders, who finally sought to make slavery perpetual in a war that often pitted Georgians against each other. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the state struggled with the consequences of the conflict, political, social, and economic. The postwar years were highlighted by economic stagnation, questions over the meaning of freedom, and one-party politics. Race relations pervaded the state's history after the Civil War and those struggles are traced from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Era and twenty-first century voter suppression. In the latter half of the twentieth century, and carrying into the twenty-first, Georgia drifted away from the provincialism that characterized its history and moved toward modernity.