From the time he became mayor in 1937 until he retired in 1961, William Hartsfield dedicated himself to the problems and promise of the city of Atlanta. In the twenty-five years he served as mayor, Atlanta grew from a depression-haunted city to the third most populous capital city in the nation, as well as the leading cultural, commercial, and financial center of the south. During his administration, potentially explosive race relations and controversial annexation issues were handled, laying the foundation for modern Atlanta. Published in 1978, Harold H. Martin's biography is a chronicle of how Hartsfield strove to fulfill the destiny of Atlanta, and in doing so, left his mark on the city forever.

From the end of Georgia's white primary in 1946 to the present, Atlanta has been a community of growing black electoral strength and stable white economic power. Yet the ballot box and investment money never became opposing weapons in a battle for domination. Instead, Atlanta experienced the emergence and evolution of a biracial coalition. Although beset by changing conditions and significant cost pressures, this coalition has remained intact. At critical junctures forces of cooperation overcame antagonisms of race and ideology. While retaining a critical distance from rational choice theory, author Clarence Stone finds the problem of collective action to be centrally important. The urban condition in America is one of weak and diffuse authority, and this situation favors any group that can act cohesively and control a substantial body of resources. Those endowed with a capacity to promote cooperation can attract allies and overcome oppositional forces. On the negative side of the political ledger, Atlanta's style of civic cooperation is achieved at a cost. Despite an ambitious program of physical redevelopment, the city is second only to Newark, New Jersey, in the poverty rate. Social problems, conflict of interest issues, and inattention to the production potential of a large lower class bespeak a regime unable to address a wide range of human needs. No simple matter of elite domination, it is a matter of governing arrangements built out of selective incentives and inside deal-making; such arrangements can serve only limited purposes. The capacity of urban regimes to bring about elaborate forms of physical redevelopment should not blind us to their incapacity to address deeply rooted social problems. Stone takes the historical approach seriously. The flow of events enables us to see how some groups deploy their resource advantages to fashion governing arrangements to their liking. But no one enjoys a completely free hand; some arrangements are more workable than others. Stone's theory-minded analysis of key events enables us to ask why and what else might be done. Regime Politics offers readers a political history of postwar Atlanta and an elegant, innovative, and incisive conceptual framework destined to influence the way urban politics is studied.

In the spring of 1960, unprecedented public hearings were held on segregation and the future of public education. These hearings, held by John Sibley and the Georgia General Assembly Committee on Schools, offered a rare glimpse into the reactions of southerners--black and white--to the changes wrought by the civil rights movement. Restructured Resistance uses newly opened private papers, public records, newspaper reports, and oral history interviews to examine how the desegregation of public schools in Georgia reflected the evolution of southern society, economics, and politics. In the midst of crisis over segregation as a symbol of southern distinctiveness, the state legislature accepted the inevitable, adopted the Sibley Commission's proposals, and created a deliberate and more utilitarian form of defiance--a restructured resistance--rooted in contemporary practicality and corporate pragmatism.

Atlanta writer Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) wrote Gone with the Wind (1936), one of the best-selling novels of all time. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was the basis of the 1939 film, the first movie to win more than five Academy Awards. Margaret Mitchell did not publish another novel after Gone with the Wind. Supporting the troops during World War II, assisting African-American students financially, serving in the American Red Cross, selling stamps and bonds, and helping others--usually anonymously--consumed her. This book reveals little-known facts about this altruistic woman. The Margaret Mitchell Encyclopedia documents Mitchell's work, her life, her impact on Atlanta, the city's memorials to her, her residences, details of her death, information about her family, the establishment of the Margaret Mitchell House against great odds, and her relationships with the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Junior League.

These are the people who hauled Georgia up from its poor, agrarian roots, making it among the most diversified, prosperous states in the country. They fought for freedom and served in the statehouse and White House. They excelled at sports, founded institutions that shaped countless lives and inspired through art and lives lived artfully. They are famous, obscure, colorful, outrageous and saintly, all with fascinating stories and all consequential, sometimes in ways felt the world over. They include Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter, Ted Turner, Alice Walker, Juliette Gordon Low, "Hammerin' Hank" Aaron and Vince Dooley. Many here are no-brainers, while others may surprise. But all deserve recognition among the most influential Georgians of the twentieth century. Join author and longtime journalist Neely Young on this journey through the lives of these significant men and women.

Race and the Greening of Atlanta turns an environmental lens on Atlanta's ascent to thriving capital of the Sunbelt over the twentieth century. Uniquely wide ranging in scale, from the city's variegated neighborhoods up to its place in regional and national political economies, this book reinterprets the fall of Jim Crow as a democratization born of two metropolitan movements: a well-known one for civil rights and a lesser known one on behalf of "the environment." Arising out of Atlanta's Black and white middle classes respectively, both movements owed much to New Deal capitalism's undermining of concentrated wealth and power, if not racial segregation, in the Jim Crow South. Placing these two movements on the same historical page, Christopher C. Sellers spotlights those environmental inequities, ideals, and provocations that catalyzed their divergent political projects. He then follows the intermittent, sometimes vital alliances they struck as civil rights activists tackled poverty, as a new environmental state arose, and as Black politicians began winning elections. Into the 1980s, as a wealth-concentrating style of capitalism returned to the city and Atlanta became a national "poster child" for sprawl, the seedbeds spread both for a national environmental justice movement and for an influential new style of antistatism. Sellers contends that this new conservativism, sweeping the South with an antienvironmentalism and budding white nationalism that echoed the region's Jim Crow past, once again challenged the democracy Atlantans had achieved.