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 […]
If Atlanta loses one more hockey team, it will be a hat trick. Hockey and the Deep South have always been something of a forced marriage. The Flames arrived in Atlanta in 1972 and reached the NHL playoffs six times in eight years playing at the Omni. But after years of low attendance and financial […]
Getting the stuff to do it yourself got a lot easier on this day in 1979 when the first two Home Depots opened. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank started a chain of large home improvement warehouses that would stock more products, often at lower prices than any competitor or hardware store. Employees knew what was […]
In July 1979, two 14-year-old boys went missing. When police found the bodies of Edward Hope Smith and Alfred Evans, it began a two-year nightmare that held Atlanta in the grip of fear. A serial killer was on the loose, and in the end at least 28 children, teenagers, and adults were victims in what […]
As was said of the great architect Christopher Wren, if you wish to know his legacy, look around you. George Heery was born in Athens in 1927. After a stint in the Pacific theater in the Navy during World War II, he earned an architectural degree at Georgia Tech. George and his father founded the […]
She was the first African-American woman elected to the Georgia Legislature. Grace Towns Hamilton was born in Atlanta in 1907. She graduated from Atlanta University in 1927 before earning a masters degree in psychology from Ohio State. Hamilton taught college for the next decade before she was appointed executive director of the Atlanta Urban League […]
If you love roller coasters, you probably should thank Six Flags. Opened in 1967, the park takes its name from the six flags that have flown over some part of Georgia during its long history—Spain, France, Great Britain, the United States, the Confederacy, and the state of Georgia. Angus Wynne had opened Six Flags over […]
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 […]
The man who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a small-time crook with big ambitions. James Earl Ray was born in Alton, Illinois, in 1928. After spending some time in the Army, he robbed gas stations and grocery stores. First convicted in 1949, Ray was serving a 20-year prison sentence in Missouri when he […]
It grew from a crop-dusting company based in the Mississippi River delta and became one of Georgia’s most famous corporate residents. Delta Air Lines began life in 1924 as a crop duster, based first in Macon and then Monroe, Louisiana. Collett Woolman bought the company in 1928 and renamed it Delta Air Service, with passenger […]
