Georgia

Farmer, railroad worker, horse jockey, moonshiner and country music’s first big star — that was John William Carson. Fannin County native fiddlin’ John Carson was a colorful character who played every year at the Georgia old-time fiddlers’ conventions in Atlanta beginning in 1913. He first gained fame performing “The Ballad Of Mary Phagan” during the […]

Georgia steadfastly opposed women’s suffrage, so no one ever expected the first woman in the U.S. Senate to be from Georgia. But that’s what happened on this day in 1922. Rebecca Latimer was born in 1835 near Decatur. She married William Felton and was actively involved in his political career as a state legislator and […]

While $3.5 billion in sales a year, is not, as the saying has it, chicken feed, Truett Cathy’s family-owned corporation feeds a lot of people a lot of chicken. Born in Atlanta in 1921, Cathy came up during the Great Depression. With a deep spirituality and a determined work ethic, he opened the Dwarf Grill, […]

The women of Georgia finally got the right to vote on this day in 1921 when Governor Thomas Hardwick signed the act that made it official. The suffrage movement had been slow to gain ground in the South. Many women joined men in arguing that there was no more important job than wife and mother, […]

Americans may love individual liberties, but there is a social engineering streak in some of us a mile wide—and when reformers can’t persuade, they try to pass laws. Prohibition in the United States goes back to the 1820s and 30s, during the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical Protestants organized both temperance […]

He was one Southern governor who chose not to stand in the schoolhouse door. Ernest Vandiver was born in Canon, Georgia, in 1918 and graduated from the University of Georgia before serving as a bomber pilot in World War II. Elected governor in 1958, Vandiver cleaned up the state’s image after the scandals and corruption […]

It killed more Americans than all of our 20th century wars combined. When 138 soldiers at Camp Gordon in Atlanta were hit with it this day in 1918, the Spanish Flu epidemic had spread across Georgia. The flu hit just as World War I ended. That war took 10 million lives over four years. The […]

When America entered World War I, Georgia entered a new era in which the military began to loom large in our state. In 1917, Georgia already had five major federal military installations: Fort McPherson, south of Atlanta; Fort Oglethorpe near the Tennessee border; Augusta’s arsenal and Camp Hancock, and Fort Screven on Tybee Island. The […]

Mixing religion and politics worked out well for Henry McNeal Turner. Free-born in South Carolina in 1834, he was educated by white attorneys at a firm where he did janitorial work. Drawn to preaching, he led revivals in Macon, Athens, and Augusta. He pastored a church in Washington D.C., where he met Republican congressmen Charles […]

Her fame rested on one indelible performance: a slave who lacked the midwifery skills to help Melanie Hamilton. Thelma McQueen was born in Florida in 1911. She moved to Augusta after her father abandoned the family. She studied acting, dance, and music in New York. Her nickname derived from a performance in the Butterfly Ballet […]