Georgia: A Brief History

by David Williams, Christopher C. Meyers

Overview

Here, for the first time is a brief, balanced, and up-to-date history of Georgia from the early Native Americans to the twenty-first century. Based on the most recent research, Georgia: A Brief History surveys the people and events that shaped our state's history in a style that reads easily and flows effortlessly. Beginning with the earliest Native American settlements, the story tells of first contacts between area natives and Spanish from Florida, British from Carolina, and James Oglethorpe leading the effort to found a colony called Georgia. That colony passed out of the British Empire during the American Revolution, a conflict that was as much a civil war as a war for independence. In the following decades, the Creek and Cherokee were driven out as Georgia was transformed into a cotton kingdom dominated by a minority of slaveholders, who finally sought to make slavery perpetual in a war that often pitted Georgians against each other. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the state struggled with the consequences of the conflict, political, social, and economic. The postwar years were highlighted by economic stagnation, questions over the meaning of freedom, and one-party politics. Race relations pervaded the state's history after the Civil War until well into the twentieth century and those struggles are traced from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Era. In the latter half of the twentieth century, and carrying into the twenty-first, Georgia drifted away from the provincialism that characterized its history and moved toward modernity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780881462791
Publisher:	Mercer University Press
Publication date:	05/28/2012
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	463,572
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Christopher C. Meyers is a professor of history at Valdosta State University where he teaches Georgia history, US political history, and U.S. military history. His previous books include The Empire State of the South and Union General John A. McClernand and the Politics of Command.

David Williams is professor of history at Valdosta State University where for more than a quarter-century he has taught Old South, Civil War, and Georgia history. He holds a PhD from Auburn University and is author of ten books involving Southern history, including BITTERLY DIVIDED: THE SOUTH'S INNER CIVIL WAR.

Table of Contents

Introduction vi

Chapter 1 Natives, Europeans, and the Founding of Georgia 1

Chapter 2 Royal Colony and Revolution 30

Chapter 3 Land Frauds, Lotteries, and Indian Removal Scandal 53

Chapter 4 Planters, Plain Folk, and the Enslaved 75

Chapter 5 Secession and Civil War 101

Chapter 6 Post-Civil War Georgia 130

Chapter 7 The Progressive Era and Jim Crow 158

Chapter 8 The Depression, New Deal, and World War II 181

Chapter 9 The Civil Rights Era 204

Chapter 10 Modern Georgia 224

Appendices 247

Further Reading 266

Index 275