It suffered the highest casualty rate of any American forces in World War II. The Eighth Air Force was organized in Savannah in January 1942 as part of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Its mission was straightforward, but easier said than flown: bombing heavily defended strategic and military targets in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. The […]
Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, as we see in the story of former Georgia Governor Thomas Hardwick. Born in Thomasville in 1872, Hardwick served in the state legislature in the 1890s as a staunch advocate of disenfranchising black voters. Yet later, he lost an election by opposing the Ku Klux Klan. Hardwick also served […]
General James Oglethorpe founded the colony of Georgia, but his grave had been lost in England until it was found by the man who also re-founded Oglethorpe University. Thornwell Jacobs was born in South Carolina in 1877. His grandfather served on the faculty of the original Oglethorpe, founded in 1835 and out of business since […]
The son of sharecroppers in Webster County became one of the longest serving U.S. senators in Georgia history. Walter F. George graduated from Mercer Law School and won election to the U.S. Senate in 1922. He supported early New Deal programs but broke with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over his attempt to pack the Supreme […]
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 […]
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 […]
The second Georgian to serve as Secretary of State was a prime architect of the Vietnam War. Dean Rusk was born in Cherokee County in 1909. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford prior to World War II, Rusk strongly opposed appeasement of Hitler, a position towards tyranny that would shape his worldview all his life. Rusk […]
Joel Chandler Harris was a New South journalist, a folklorist, and one of Georgia’s most famous authors. He was born in Eatonton in 1845. Like Ben Franklin, Harris learned to write by hand-setting newspaper type, working at Turnwold Plantation for Joseph Addison Turner. After working in Macon and Savannah, Harris went to work for Henry […]
Eastern Airlines flew into the sunset in 1991, but it helped make Atlanta the transportation and commercial capital of the South. The airline began life as Pitcairn Aviation in 1927, carrying airmail for the government along an eastern route that connected New York to Florida via Atlanta. The company became Eastern Air Transport in 1930, […]
They were the quintessential college rock band of the 1980s, working in the town Rolling Stone called “the best college music scene in the country.” Michael Stipe was an art student at the University of Georgia when he met Peter Buck at the Wuxtry Record store in Athens. Together with Mike Mills and Bill Berry, […]
