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By Jamil Zainaldin

Who were the men, women, and children whose labor in the cotton mills powered the creation of modern Georgia? For the most part mill workers were poor, uneducated, and white. (Few blacks worked in the segregated mills until after World War II.)

Mill hands migrated from the countryside’s sharecropping and tenant farming families, as did laborers who struggled to scratch a living from a land that was still trying to recover from a devastating war.

Mill work was rough and not infrequently dangerous. The average day began with the factory morning whistle. Shifts typically ran 10 to 12 hours, and the workweek six days. The high-end hourly rate for men in 1928 was 25 cents, and as low as 10 to 15 cents for women and children. To survive, most of the family worked: women and children generally could be found in the spinning rooms, while men handled the carding and weaving. When God said he needed the seventh day for rest, the millworker understood why.

This week, MIKE SANTROCK, of the Fulton County Schools Archives, reflects on the Cold War’s impact on Georgia’s schools.  

By Mike Santrock

For many of us, the Cold War is not that distant a memory. We grew up in an age when two superpowers held the world captive, “like two scorpions in a bottle,” according to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb. In our day, a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union would have killed in minutes more people than had been killed in all other 20th century wars combined.

This week, SONNY SEALS, author of Historic Rural Churches of Georgia, a co-publication of Georgia Humanities and the University of Georgia Press, discusses his efforts to save Georgia’s rural churches.

By Sonny Seals

Georgia is blessed with hundreds of rural churches that represent a unique way to look at 18th and 19th century Georgia history. Indeed, they tell the story of a time when virtually all of Georgia was rural — the story of where we came from, how we got here and who we are.