Georgia
Subtitle: a brief history
By: David Williams, Christopher C. Meyers
Contributors: Meyers, Christopher C.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Macon, Ga
Language: eng
Number of pages: 286
ISBN-13: 9780881462791; 9780881463729
Subjects: History
Description: 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-politically, socially, and economically. 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Natives, Europeans, and the Founding of Georgia : Pre-Columbian Georgia; title: Royal Colony and Revolution : Georgia Becomes a Royal Colony; title: Land, Lotteries, and Indian Removal : Land Grants and the Headright Scandal; title: Planters, Plain Folk, and the Enslaved : The Rise of King Cotton; title: Secession and Civil War : The Georgia Platform and Slavery's Expansion; title: Post-Civil War Georgia : Reconstruction, Political and Social; title: The Progressive Era and Jim Crow; title: The Depression, New Deal, and World War II; title: The Civil Rights Era; title: Modern Georgia; title: Appendices.