The U.S. Constitution has always been contentious. Our sacred charter was born in controversy and remains so to this day. Georgia elected six delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Only four went. And only two—Abraham Baldwin and William Few—signed the final document. The convention, chaired by George Washington, had […]
Few presidential acts have had more impact upon the arc of history than the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on this day in 1863. It transformed a war for union into a crusade for human freedom. Emancipation had not initially been a U.S. war aim. As the Union death toll mounted however, support […]
World War II had a global impact and it transformed Georgia as well. Some 320,000 Georgians served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the war, and thousands of others, including historic numbers of women, served in wartime industries. The war brought an infusion of federal dollars into Georgia. Every major Georgia city housed a military […]
He took Coca-Cola from the drug store to Main Street, and endowed a great university. Asa Candler was born in Villa Rica in 1851. While working as a pharmacist in Atlanta in 1887 he bought the rights and formula for Coca-Cola from John Pemberton for $2,300. Candler thought the concoction’s future was a soft drink […]
It cost three men their lives and provided the legal basis for the Trail of Tears, the forcible removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia. The Treaty of New Echota was signed on this day in 1835, ceding Cherokee land to the U.S. in exchange for compensation. The treaty had been negotiated by a Cherokee […]
The first Southerner in the White House after the Civil War grew up in Georgia, and knew the war firsthand. Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia in 1856. Not long after, his family moved to Augusta, where his father pastored the First Presbyterian Church for 12 years. Young Tommy Wilson grew up in a […]
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” The words of baseball great and civil rights pioneer Jackie Robinson, who was born to a family of sharecroppers in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919. Robinson became the first athlete ever at UCLA to earn letters in four different sports. During World […]
What better gift than freedom? That’s what William and Ellen Craft gave each other, and celebrated this day in 1848. Their memoir, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, was exactly what they did. The Crafts were slaves in Macon who devised a daring and dangerous plan of escape. Ellen was the daughter of her white […]
It’s one of Georgia’s great architectural treasures, and it opened on Christmas day in 1929. The Fabulous Fox Theatre on the corner of Peachtree and Ponce de Leon was originally built as the meeting hall for the Shriners, which explains its Moorish design. The initial cost was $2.2 million but it took the money of […]
The War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain officially ended on Christmas Eve, 1814, with the Treaty of Ghent. Georgians were deeply involved in the war on several fronts. General John Floyd led troops against Britain’s Indian allies in Alabama in decisive battles that would eventually open up the region to American […]
