Jamil Zainaldin is president of Georgia Humanities, a nonprofit organization working to ensure that humanities and culture remain an integral part of the lives of Georgians. The organization is a cultural leader in the state as well as a pioneer nationally in innovative history and humanities programs. The New Georgia Encyclopedia is a project of Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Office of the Governor, the University of Georgia Press, and the University System of Georgia/GALILEO. The first state encyclopedia to be conceived and designed exclusively for publication on the Internet, the NGE is an important and authoritative digital resource for all Georgians.
This week, JOSEPH H. KITCHENS, executive director of the Funk Heritage Center at Reinhardt University, remembers a group of Georgia soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice.
You may have heard that when Sam Houston’s forces defeated the Mexican army in 1836, freeing Texas from Mexican control, their battle cry was “Remember the Alamo!” They also shouted “Remember Goliad!” in honor of James Walker Fannin Jr. and group of soldiers from Georgia who had been massacred at “the other Alamo.”
This week, KAYE LANNING MINCHEW, retired director of the Troup County Archives, introduces her new book, A President in Our Midst: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Georgia, a co-publication of Georgia Humanities and the University of Georgia Press.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt “discovered” Warm Springs, Georgia, and its beneficial warm waters in 1924 as he sought to overcome the effects of polio. He grew to love the state and its people, and returned many times over the next 21 years.
This week, guest columnist JIM GARDNER, executive for Legislative Archives, Presidential Libraries, and Museum Services at the National Archives, discusses an upcoming program at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
In commemoration of the 225th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the National Archives is launching its “National Conversation on Rights and Justice” with a two-day program in Atlanta at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum.
This week, ALLISON HUTTON, of Georgia Humanities, introduces Melissa Fay Greene’s forthcoming book, The Underdogs: Children, Dogs, and the Power of Unconditional Love.
“Our bond with dogs is an ancient facet of our humanity,” claims Melissa Fay Greene, award-winning author of The Underdogs: Children, Dogs, and the Power of Unconditional Love, forthcoming from Ecco/Harper-Collins on May 17.
This week, in honor of Hometown Teams: How Sports Shape America, a traveling Smithsonian exhibition sponsored by Georgia Humanities, MARK K. BAUMAN, editor of Southern Jewish History, and JEREMY KATZ, director of the Cuba Family Archives for Southern Jewish History of the Breman Museum, share a story about Atlanta’s hometown team, the Braves.
The color barrier for major league baseball was broached when Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947. A few months later, Larry Doby donned the uniform of the Cleveland Indians. Numerous challenges lay ahead for integrated teams and the segregated South.
This week, ALLISON HUTTON, program coordinator at Georgia Humanities, explores the ways Atlanta remembers the Holocaust.
What — and how — does Atlanta remember? Recent years have seen Atlanta remember the Civil War through battle reenactments, exhibitions, and lectures on the occasion of the war’s sesquicentennial. Anniversaries notwithstanding, Atlanta’s Civil War past has always been important, as demonstrated by the city seal. The dates on the seal, 1847 and 1865, reference Atlanta’s beginning and its re-beginning, respectively. The motto spanning the top of the seal, resurgens (Latin for “rising again”), references Atlanta’s postwar recovery after being burnt by Sherman’s Union forces in November 1864. The seal’s mythical phoenix, rising from the flames, points to a connection between tragedy and triumph, the latter made all the more meaningful by the former.
This week, guest columnist BETTY HOLLAN, executive director of Georgia Women of Achievement, recognizes the achievements of Sapelo Island midwife Katie Hall Underwood.
If you visited Sapelo Island from 1920 until 1968, you may have seen a strong, lean woman briskly walking from one end of the island to the other, a long seven-mile stretch, her mind set on delivering another baby into this world. Born into a family of freed slaves in 1884, Katie Hall Underwood was the last of a long line of Sapelo midwives. Her skilled hands and soothing demeanor brought generations of proud Gullah-Geechee people into the world.
This week, guest columnist MARILYNN RICHTARIK, professor of English at Georgia State University shares the story of Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916 and the ways Atlanta is commemorating its centenary.
100 years ago this month, after a small group of activists seized key buildings in central Dublin during the Easter Monday holiday, poet and schoolmaster Patrick Pearse stood outside the rebels’ headquarters in the General Post Office and read aloud a Proclamation declaring an Irish Republic to a handful of bemused passers-by. Within days, the British Army had quashed the Rising; within weeks its most prominent leaders had been summarily executed. This brutal reaction, though, turned what had been a fringe movement in favor of the complete separation of Britain and Ireland into a popular cause with martyrs. As Irish poet W. B. Yeats put it in “Easter, 1916,” a “terrible beauty” had been born.
This week, guest columnist WILLIAM J. MORTON, author of The Story of Georgia’s Boundaries: A Meeting of History and Geography, shares the story of Georgia’s mismeasured northern boundary.
What does Georgia — more specifically, Atlanta — need to thrive? Today, like many large and expanding metropolitan areas across the United States, it needs water. The drought of 2008 in Georgia brought renewed attention to the fact that if the Georgia/Tennessee boundary had been properly surveyed along the 35th latitude, then plenty of water from the Tennessee River would be available for Georgia’s citizens. This is the story of Georgia’s mismeasured northern boundary.
This week, guest columnist ALLISON HUTTON, program coordinator at Georgia Humanities, examines how Andalusia Farm, former home of author Flannery O’Connor, uses animals to tell Georgia’s story.
In the children’s book Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type, written by Doreen Cronin and illustrated by Betsy Lewin, Farmer Brown has a problem. His cows have found a typewriter and have taken to writing him letters about conditions in the barnyard. With the exception of the Chick-fil-A cows decorating billboards that line the interstate, there have been no reports of literate cows in Georgia (yet). Still, animals are an essential — and charming — part of the way that many Georgia museums and historic sites tell their stories.
This week, guest columnist HERMINA GLASS-HILL, a public historian, explores the transformation of Susie King Taylor, a Civil War nurse, into a an early social justice activist and racial uplift advocate.
Susie Baker King Taylor, born in 1848 in Liberty County, is celebrated as the only African American woman ever to have written an autobiography of her enlistment and service as a teacher and a nurse in the first all-black regiment in the history of the U.S. army. Yet very little has been written about her private emotions, frustrations, and disappointments. These aspects of Taylor’s life resonate very deeply within my own spirit, and are just as compelling as her public achievements.
This week, guest columnist TANYA CALDWELL, Georgia State University professor of English, shares the special connection between Atlanta and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
By Tanya Caldwell
Jimmy Carter’s outstanding legacy is his work in developing understanding between different peoples. A little of that work is being done annually at Georgia State University as a direct result of President Carter’s first foreign visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne on May 6, 1977.
This week guest columnist GLENN T. ESKEW, a Georgia State University professor, explores historic landscapes.
For the second time, the inclement weather had passed north of Atlanta, and I found myself heading south to attend yet another history conference. The academic year was in full swing, and scholars like the winter months for symposia. Rather than take the interstate, I prefer riding back roads and drove down Georgia Highway 15 through the old Cotton Belt.
This week, guest columnist STANLEY ROMANSTEIN of Georgia State University makes a case for supporting the music industry in Georgia.
How do we create and promote a viable, growing, sustainable music industry in our state? Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller first put that question to the Georgia General Assembly in 1978 by naming both a Senate Music Recording Industry Study Committee and a Music Recording Industry Advisory Committee.
This week guest columnist GLENN T. ESKEW, discusses Johnny Mercer’s connection to the Great American Songbook and Georgia State University.
On Friday, February 26 at 8 p.m. Georgia State University will hold its biannual Mercer Celebration at the Rialto Center for the Arts with a performance by trumpeter Joe Gransden joined by vocalist Kathleen Bertrand and the Georgia State University Big Band. With this concert, Georgia State University celebrates native son Johnny Mercer, as well as its own good fortune in housing Mercer’s memorabilia, donated to the university by his widow, Ginger, in June 1981.
Recently, Atlanta actor Brenda Bynum introduced me to Helen Matthews Lewis through a brilliant one-person play. The locale was the Craddock Center of Cherry Log, Georgia, an educational and cultural venue for children, families, and communities in southern Appalachia. Helen Lewis is a native Georgian and professional sociologist who helped found the discipline of Appalachian Studies, an academic movement that combines scholarship, teaching, and community engagement in the South’s mountain region.
This week guest columnist CHRIS DOBBS, editorial assistant for the New Georgia Encyclopedia, shares the story of Eugene Bullard, son of a former slave, and the first black fighter pilot.
Eugene Bullard was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895. As an expatriate in France, he became a boxer, soldier, fighter pilot, business owner, and spy. During his final years, in the United States, he was an elevator operator. Bullard’s story is particularly engaging. He was obviously a tight spring of potential as a boy, and it’s fascinating to see how high he flew as soon as the environment around him allowed it. The difference between his life in the United States and his life in Europe lends his life its striking cinematic scale.
This week guest columnist PEARL MCHANEY, a Georgia State University professor, discusses how voices from our past speak to our present.
With inflammatory rhetoric about citizenship, the value of lives black, brown, and white, and the memorialization/revision of history, I feel that hearing the carefully written words of Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Ernest Gaines will help to ground us in our shared past and give us opportunity to engage in reasoned discourse.
What does the popular play Wit have to do with Emory University, Atlanta public schools, Lawrenceville, the Peabody awards, and the centennial of the Pulitzer Prize? Read on for the answers.
This week guest contributor EVE HOFFMAN reveals her role in helping to tell the stories of those affected by breast cancer as part of the “Celebration of Healing” project with artist Sal Brownfield.
I leaned against a wall in Sal Brownfield’s art studio, camera in hand, a model 20 feet away, holding the formal dress she’d worn to the first Pink Tie Ball after her breast cancer surgery. Suddenly, he dropped a canvas on the floor and asked the model if she could stand still. It was intense. I slipped out without speaking.
