This work offers a look at the history of Georgia through over 100 primary documents. "The Empire State of the South: Georgia History in Documents and Essays" offers teachers of Georgia history an alternative to the traditional narrative textbook. In this volume, students have the opportunity to read Georgia history rather than reading about Georgia history. Encompassing the entirety of Georgia history into the twenty-first century, "The Empire State of the South" is suitable for all courses on Georgia history. This text is divided into 16 chapters comprising 129 documents and 33 essays on various topics of Georgia history. The primary documents represent a wide range of genres, including speeches, newspaper columns, letters, treaties, laws, proclamations, state constitutions, court decisions, and many others. Some documents outline general themes or movements in Georgia history while others address more narrow issues. The thirty-three essays are excerpts from larger pieces that were written by specialists in Georgia history. Each chapter consists of several parts. First is a short narrative introduction. The second part contains the documents themselves. Following the documents are two essays written by historians regarding some topic relevant to the chapter. At the end of each chapter is a short list of suggested readings. The documents themselves range from the usual: state constitutions, laws, and speeches, to the inordinate: plans for constructing what is regarded as the state's first concrete home, a corny campaign song for Eugene Talmadge, an attempt by the General Assembly in 1897 to ban the playing of football, and a 1962 letter Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote from an Albany prison that preceded his more well-known Birmingham letter. Georgia has indeed had a colorful history and "The Empire State of the South" tells that story.

Renowned New South booster Henry Grady proposed industrialization as a basis of economic recovery for the former Confederacy. Born in 1850 in Athens, Georgia, to a family involved in the city's thriving manufacturing industries, Grady saw firsthand the potential of industrialization for the region. In Transition to an Industrial South, Michael J. Gagnon explores the creation of an industrial network in the antebellum South by focusing on the creation and expansion of cotton textile manufacture in Athens. By 1835, local entrepreneurs had built three cotton factories in Athens, started a bank, and created the Georgia Railroad. Although known best as a college town, Athens became an industrial center for Georgia in the antebellum period and maintained its stature as a factory hub even after competing cities supplanted it in the late nineteenth century. Georgia, too, remained the foremost industrial state in the South until the 1890s. Gagnon reveals the political nature of procuring manufacturing technology and building cotton mills in the South, and demonstrates the generational maturing of industrial laboring, managerial, and business classes well before the advent of the New South era. He also shows how a southern industrial society grew out of a culture of social and educational reform, economic improvements, and business interests in banking and railroading. Using Athens as a case study, Gagnon suggests that the connected networks of family, business, and financial relations provided a framework for southern industry to profit during the Civil War and served as a principal guide to prosperity in the immediate postbellum years.

Beginning in 1956 each vol. includes as a regular number the Blue book of southern progress and the Southern industrial directory, formerly issued separately.

First published in 1977, A History of Georgia has become the standard history of the state. Documenting events from the earliest discoveries by the Spanish to the rapid changes the state has undergone with the civil rights era, the book gives broad coverage to the state's social, political, economic, and cultural history. This work details Georgia's development from past to present, including the early Cherokee land disputes, the state's secession from the Union, cotton's reign, Reconstruction, the Bourbon era, the effects of the New Deal, Martin Luther King, Jr., the fall of the county-unit system, and Jimmy Carter's election to the presidency. Also noted are the often-overlooked contributions of Indians, blacks, and women. Each imparting his own special knowledge and understanding of a particular period in the state's history, the authors bring into focus the personalities and events that made Georgia what it is today. For this new edition, available in paperback for the first time, A History of Georgia has been revised to bring the work up through the events of the 1980s. The bibliographies for each section and the appendixes have also been updated to include relevant scholarship from the last decade.

From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750--1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.