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 guest contributor BRIAN BRODRICK, city councilman in Watkinsville and Georgia Humanities board member, calls for the memory of Atticus Haygood to be pulled from the shadow of New South spokesman Henry Grady and brought out to our public space.
The name — Atticus Greene Haygood — conjures images of To Kill a Mockingbird and old Georgia, which are both appropriate.
Clarence Jordan, from a distinguished Georgia family of politicians and community leaders, began a career in the 1930s as a Baptist minister. A rising star, he had a reputation for distinction that was spreading throughout the state and the South. With time, any pulpit or university appointment could be his.
This week guest contributor PAUL M. PRESSLY, director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance, provides a brief history of efforts to protect Georgia’s coast, and reminds us why the coast matters.
With only 100 miles of coastline, Georgia is blessed with some of the most extensive salt marshes in the nation, hosting one-third of the marsh on the entire East Coast. So what a shock in May 2014 when the Environmental Protection Division nullified its old policy and ruled that the requirement of a 25-foot buffer between developed areas and marsh was eliminated.
This week guest contributor STEVE SUITTS, an adjunct lecturer at the Institute of Liberal Arts of Emory University and a Senior Fellow at the Southern Education Foundation, looks at the benefits of the Voting Rights Act for blacks and whites alike.
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was originally opposed by most white southerners, as were the other three pillars of civil rights law passed during a period of only four years, from 1964 through 1968.”
This week guest contributor JOHN INSCOE, a University of Georgia professor and the founding editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, looks at the major works of playwright Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy and The Last Night of Ballyhoo.
Georgia has no shortage of influential writers. Flannery O’Connor, Margaret Mitchell, and Natasha Tretheway. Alfred Uhry, Ralph McGill, and Alice Walker. Conrad Aiken, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Hood, and Raymond Andrews. These are just some of the inductees into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, founded in 2000 by the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia. They all have one thing in common: they are among the best anywhere at their storytelling craft.
This week guest contributor BARBARA McCASKILL, a University of Georgia professor, tells how escaped slaves built a community that serves as a model for our times.
February 12 is Georgia Day, a time for commemorating the founding of the 13th colony in 1733. Our state has many distinctions when it comes to historic sites and architecture, and more than a handful of firsts. On any list of eminent inheritances belongs Georgia’s premier coastal gem, Savannah, the birthplace of the colony and state.
The 20th century was the bloodiest in recorded history. But the wars of colonialism and strife in two worldwide cataclysms of violence produced rebellious offspring — the global pursuit of peace and human rights. Remarkably, one of the intersections of this story is present-day Atlanta. And that story begins on an estate about 130 miles south of Moscow, at the home of a Russian count.
This week guest contributor THOMAS A. SCOTT, professor emeritus of history at Kennesaw State University, looks at the education, voting, and prison reforms of a forward-thinking governor.
If great leaders take people where they didn’t know they wanted to go, but where they needed to go to stay in step with the future, then Ellis Arnall has to be listed as one of the most effective leaders in Georgia history.
This week guest contributor SHEFFIELD HALE, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center and a Georgia Humanities Council board member, tells the story of white Atlanta’s reaction to MLK’s Nobel Peace Prize.
On October 14, 1964, the Nobel Committee announced that thirty-five-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
This week guest contributor LAURA MCCARTY of the Georgia Humanities Council talks about a Georgia tradition — giving.
Last month I attended the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta holiday meeting. Almost 200 people were there, which is about double the number that gather each Tuesday at the Loudermilk Center to learn, serve, and connect. The reason why? Santa Claus was in attendance, and he and Tom Gay (president of Gay Construction) presented checks totaling almost $235,000 to 58 nonprofits to assist with projects that benefit the children and youth of metropolitan Atlanta.
From longtime recipients the Boys & Girls Club of Metro Atlanta and Hillside to first-time recipient the Southeastern Trust for Parks and Land, board members and staff turned out to accept the checks, say thank you, and celebrate with the Kiwanians.
Floyd County lies in the green ridges and valleys about 90 minutes northwest of Atlanta. Its presence is a reminder that we need not travel the world to find exotic monuments and clues to civilizations’ ebbing and flowing.
In fact, its history is almost a perfect national prism: the jostling for a place to call home by diverse populations, and the gradual as well as sweeping social changes they ignited.
This week guest contributor ROSS KING, executive director of ACCG, Georgia’s county association, and a Georgia Humanities Council board member, invites readers to take a new look at Georgia’s courthouses.
This week, guest contributor MARTIN LEHFELDT, former Georgia Humanities Council board member and former president of the Southeastern Council of Foundations, muses on what southerners have taught him.
Four and a half decades ago, I came South for what I assumed would be a brief cultural experience. I never left.
Learning how to live together peacefully is a theme again — actually, it has been a theme all throughout American history. Ferguson is the momentary focal point, and based on our history, we can expect other cases to emerge like lava flows, evidence of the colliding forces hidden just below the surface. Ferguson raises a question: How can we learn to see each other clearly and without the lens of prejudgment?
There is perhaps no more difficult yet essential act we can take. Yet for many, every fiber of their nature seems to make it difficult to cross the divides.
This week, guest columnist TODD GROCE, president and CEO of the Georgia Historical Society, asks why events that occurred 150 ago still matter today.
One hundred and fifty years ago this fall, in September 1864, U.S. forces commanded by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman captured Atlanta, the communication, transportation, and manufacturing hub of the Deep South and, after the capital in Richmond, the most important city in the Confederacy.
Though Veterans Day is past, our appreciation for those in uniform is never far from mind. Our remembrance extends back in time, too, across the generations. For many, remembrance is inseparable from patriotism.
Ask most people what patriotism is, and they will say loyalty to one’s country or native land. They will also point to a willingness to defend it. This is a good-enough definition. But American patriotism is something more than a defense of the homeland.
The 21st-century idea of sleeping in a slave cabin from the antebellum era is at first challenging to the mind and the memory. What’s the point? Who would choose to do this? But this is exactly what Joseph McGill Jr., the founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, does.
Most slave cabins are now “gone with the wind,” although a number of them still exist, some modestly preserved and used for new purposes, some in ramshackle condition.
Eleven of Georgia’s 159 counties are tucked in the northeast corner of the state, where the history and culture of the land is inseparable from the mountains. There, the Appalachian mountain chain and the trail by the same name begin their long journey northward to Maine.
From atop Georgia’s highest point, Brasstown Bald, the eye looks out on the intersection of four states, with their tree-covered cliffs, knobs, creeks, and rivers, as well as the ever-present vultures tracing lazy circles in the sky.
