These nine essays originally appeared in the Georgia Historical Quarterly and range in subject from a group of Arcadians expelled from Nova Scotia that settled in colonial Georgia to the origins of the University of Georgia. Other essays examine the Woolfolk murder case that attracted national attention; Henry M. Turner, a black legislator during the Reconstruction; and John Howard Payne, the author of "Home, Sweet Home."

Robert Toombs of Georgia stands as one of the most fiery and influential politicians of the nineteenth century. Sarcastic, charming, egotistical, and gracious, he rose quickly from state office to congressman to senator in the decades before the Civil War. Though he sought sectional reconciliation throughout the 1840s and 1850s, he eventually became one of the South's most ardent secessionists. This thorough biography chronicles his days as a student and young lawyer in Georgia, his boisterous political career, his appointment as the Confederacy's first Secretary of State, his unsuccessful stint as a Confederate general, and his role as a proud, unreconstructed rebel after the war. An exploration of Toombs' career reveals the political forces and missteps that drove him--and people like him--to want to secede from the United States.

From the early 1960s to the present, perhaps no college town in America has changed as much as Athens, Georgia. Over the course of 50 years, the city experienced desegregation at all levels of education, encountered all types of activism and demonstrations, and established an unparalleled music scene that still flourishes. Beginning in the 1980s, University of Georgia athletic teams began winning national championships and continue to do so, the 1996 Olympics came to Athens, and the downtown district is no longer a retail center but a 24-hour central city with more restaurants, bars, and eclectic shops than one can count. Athens is no longer the sleepy, small college town it once was, but truly the Classic City in every sense of the name.

The lives of notorious bad guys, perpetrators of mischief, visionary--if misunderstood--thinkers, and other colorful antiheroes, jerks, and evil doers from history all get their due in the short essays featured in these enlightening, informative, books. Speaking Ill of the Dead: Jerks in Georgia History features 15 short biographies of nefarious characters, from wicked pirate Edward Teach to John Gatewood, a ruthless Confederate guerilla fighter during the Civil War.

By the eve of the 20th century, Middle Georgia was a rural region transitioning from the aftermath of the Reconstruction Era into the modern age. This collection of new essays describes the lives of the common people of the day. A grisly mass murder underscored issues of race, class and poverty. African Americans struggled for self-betterment against the rise of Jim Crow. Women striving to overcome gender barriers found a hero in a pioneering female pilot. The government worked to protect communities from the influenza pandemic of 1918. Fighting boll weevils and declining cotton prices, farmers diversified crops and developed a national pimento pepper industry.

Essays, projects, and interviews will examine emerging forms of sponsorship, new forms of connectivity - technological or social - that produce innovative modes of collaboration, and strategies for cultivating relationships that allow us to rethink typical hierarchies between those in power and those in service. One could argue that the profession of architecture has traditionally been characterized by patronage. Throughout the twentieth century, private clients have enabled architects to develop and realize their most significant work. Today, the landscape of patronage is shifting. While the role of private clients is still central to the survival of the profession, an increasing number of architects and design practitioners are actively cultivating partnerships with not-for-profits, granting agencies, educational institutions, and other public organizations. How are these broader relationships redefining the role of patronage in architecture? Have our current economic, ecological, and political climates provoked architecture to confront its own priorities and assumptions? How can the practice of architecture be shaped not only through relationships of power, but also through strategies of empowerment? How are emerging practitioners today grappling with issues of inclusion and exclusion in the field?