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Neighbors Joe Rogers and Tom Forkner opened their first Waffle House in Avondale Estates, in DeKalb County, in 1955. Open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, the restaurant featured its namesake — of course, the waffle — as well as eggs, grits, hashbrowns (a specialty), burgers, and T-bone steak. Initially restricted to the Deep South, Waffle House today operates in 25 states and is America’s second-largest family-style restaurant (after Denny’s). With its “retro-style dining room where customers can watch their food being prepared,” writes journalist Chris Starr, “the look and quality of the restaurant has never really changed.”

That’s the official story from the New Georgia Encyclopedia. The unofficial story is the one every regular customer knows in his or her own way, which is why that yellow sign is a southern icon.

Modern education reform is part of a national effort to promote student achievement. A thoroughly modern idea, it grew in response to the 1950s Cold War race between the United States and the Soviet Union for worldwide technology dominance. If one could point to a symbol of that era, probably it would be the 1957 launch of the satellite “Sputnik,” a threatening image in the American mind.

Indeed Sputnik not only launched a space race but changed forever how we talk about education. Certainly the space race unlocked the U.S. treasury in pursuit of new national priorities. And near the top of this list was education — at every level.

In 2014 the city is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Atlanta. Certainly most of us are familiar with the devastation that Sherman visited on Atlanta and the surrounding area in his campaign to deal a lasting blow to the Confederacy.

Less familiar, and almost entirely unknown until recent years, thanks to the work of the late University of Georgia historian Thomas G. Dyer (see Secret Yankees: The Union Circle in Confederate Atlanta), are the circumstances of the city’s surrender and the composition of the surrender delegation.

By Laura McCarty, vice president of the Georgia Humanities Council. She is a guest columnist for “Jamil’s Georgia” this week.

Music- and film-making are thriving businesses in Georgia now, but Georgia native Johnny Mercer — writer of such memorable songs as “Glow-Worm” and “Jeepers Creepers,” which were wildly popular in their day — successfully blended both during his long career.

A recent book by New Georgia Encyclopedia author Glenn T. Eskew, Johnny Mercer: Southern Songwriter for the World (published by the University of Georgia Press), explores the life and global legacy of Mercer — one of the most prolific, successful, and popular songwriters of the 20th century.

Earlier I wrote about the migration of Godfrey and Julia Barnsley from Savannah to the mountains, where Godfrey Barnsley built their dream estate, “the Woodlands” — not as a plantation, but in the style of an Italianate manor sustained by the countryside. Yet the existence of Barnsley’s dream house was dependent on his work as an international cotton agent that tied his fate and that of his family to the cotton industry.

Thus, the war of secession that engulfed Georgia came in time to the Woodlands. In May 1864 Union and Confederate troops skirmished on the grounds of the Barnsley estate as General James B. McPherson passed through Woodlands on his way to Atlanta (where he would die two months later). Seeing the manor, its gardens, fields, and vineyards, he was overwhelmed: “This is a little piece of heaven itself.”

Last week I wrote of the genesis of Barnsley Gardens, of Godfrey and Julia Barnsley’s decision to relocate from Savannah, where Godfrey was engaged in the cotton trade as a broker, to the mountains of pre-Civil War north Georgia. After a three-week journey by wagon, they settled on more than 3,000 acres of fertile land amid undulating hills, natural springs, and forest that was formerly occupied by the Cherokee. They named their estate “Woodlands.”

Their first task (with their servants and hired local help) was to begin building cabins and wood structures that would be their temporary housing. Barnsley, who seemed always to have a plan, acquired a steam-driven sawmill for lumbering and a kiln for making brick. While the challenges were obvious and included “roaming wild animals” and “wolves so numerous,” there was also nature’s bounty.