Our state still bears his name, but King George II never set foot here. He was born in Germany and when he succeeded his father, George I, in 1727, he became the second of Britain’s Hanoverian German kings. George II signed the charter creating the colony of Georgia in 1732. James Oglethorpe persuaded the king […]
He was born in a one-room shack in Barnwell, South Carolina, in 1933. He moved to Augusta, Georgia when he was five. His mother abandoned him, he grew up in abject poverty and he was sent to jail for petty theft at 15. But James Brown overcame it all to become one of the most […]
Its unmatched beauty has been around for millennia, but the largest of Georgia’s Barrier Islands only became a national seashore on this day in 1972. Cumberland Island is the southernmost of Georgia’s Sea Islands. This magical place is noted for having several unique ecological systems: beaches and dunes, inland maritime forests, and saltwater marshes. The […]
Howard Finster saw things; he literally had visions. They inspired him to create a universe of unusual paintings, sculptures, and drawings. A self-taught folk artist and preacher, he became one of the most important creative artists of the twentieth century. Finster was born in 1916 in Valley Head, Alabama, one of 14 children. He saw […]
He would tell Yankee immigrants who found fault with the South: “Delta is ready when you are.” Lewis Grizzard was born in Fort Benning and grew up in Moreland. He studied journalism at the University of Georgia. After quickly realizing he didn’t belong in Chicago, Grizzard returned to Atlanta to write a humorous regional column […]
Lyman Hall was an ordained minister, a doctor and one of three Georgians to sign the Declaration of Independence, quite a resume for a man born in Connecticut in 1747. Hall was from old New England stock and graduated from Yale. He abandoned the congregational ministry for medicine and moved South, eventually settling in Georgia […]
On this day in 1735, a group of Scottish Highlanders sailed from Inverness, Scotland aboard the Prince of Wales, bound for Georgia. They disembarked on the northern bank of the Altamaha River, where they founded New Inverness—later named Darien—60 miles south of Savannah. The Scots were among the finest soldiers in the world and had […]
He was billed as the world’s strongest man and, during the Cold War, a convenient symbol of American power. Paul Anderson was born in Toccoa, Georgia and overcame Bright’s disease as a child. A football scholarship got him to Furman University, but he quit and began lifting weights instead. Anderson discovered that he had extraordinary […]
There were many firsts in his family. Born in Dallas, Texas in 1938,Maynard Holbrook Jackson, Jr. moved to Atlanta when he was 8. His Georgia roots ran deep. His grandfather, John Wesley Dobbs, founded the Georgia Voters League. His mother was the first African-American with an Atlanta public library card. His aunt Mattiwilda was the […]
He became only the second African-American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court—and one of its most controversial members. Clarence Thomas was born in Pinpoint, Georgia, in 1948 and was raised by his grandfather as a devout Catholic. He planned to join the priesthood but left the seminary after encountering racial prejudice. Instead, he graduated […]
