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Love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. We know these as essences of life. They are also at the heart of the stories told in the poetry and plays of the great, late August Wilson (1945-2005).

He won two Pulitzer Prizes for drama, and among his best-known works are Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Set largely in the black working-class community of his native Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his plays commemorate the individuality of his characters, and in so doing bridge the differences among races to create a mutual recognition.

October is Georgia Archives Month, an occasion for commemorating the importance of preserving and documenting Georgia’s as well as the nation’s history.

The 2014 theme of Georgia Archives Month, “Sweet Tea and Southern Breezes,” sponsored by the Society of Georgia Archivists, evokes “the memories of friendship and community documented in archival collections across the state.”

About 75 miles from downtown Atlanta and about 12 miles south of Rome is one of the most beautiful settings anywhere: Cave Spring. Taking its name from an aquifer that surfaces through a limestone cave, this town of about 1,200 sits in beautiful Vann’s Valley of Floyd County in north Georgia.

The community was settled in the late 1820s as migrants from Augusta encroached on land still occupied by the Cherokee. Drawn by the gold rush of 1829 but also by the fertile valleys, early residents showed themselves to be industrious settlers whose priorities of learning, productivity, worship, and service would shape future generations.

Without a doubt, Winston Churchill is one of the most important political figures of the 20th century — or of any time. A man who withstood ostracism after the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of World War I and who entered a “political wilderness” (again) in the 1930s owing to his controversial positions on English monetary and colonial policies…

“Georgia on my mind” —  that would be an apt description for the art of the great Georgia artist Lamar Dodd, born September 22, 1909. According to New Georgia Encyclopedia author and Dodd biographer William U. Eiland, a reviewer of a 1932 New York exhibition of Dodd’s watercolors and oil paintings described his work as having “not one scene of the Scottish moors with their purple heather. . . . Not one scene of the fountains of Rome! . . . Nothing of Paris or London or Athens or Pompeii. But Georgia, Georgia, Georgia.” The critic was hailing this new “regional” American spirit of Dodd’s with both delight and relief.

Like other great Georgia artists (Johnny Mercer, Ray Charles, Benny Andrews, Flannery O’Connor), Dodd took much of his inspiration from his home state of Georgia, but unlike those greats, his name is not always as well remembered. It deserves to be.

In March of this year, about 100 people came together in Tifton, Georgia, from all parts of the state and the country to commemorate the memory of a lost, invisible past that was now found. Not long before, most had no idea of their connection to it.

The occasion was a special event convened by the Georgia Museum of Agriculture. The centerpiece was an exhibition on child labor in Georgia in the early 20th century, the mills who employed children, and the story of a single family: that of Catherine Young. To understand why this story is so remarkable to all who attended the event, we need go a back a century in time.