Georgia - Atlanta Home Page ~ 02.04.2025

Setting Up the Trip - Section 01

It's 2025 and it is my 85th birthday and I decided I needed to do something special for my birthday. Here I am in many locations on my birthday!

Chuck's Birthdays

Overview of Georgia - Section 02

The history of Georgia in the United States of America spans pre-Columbian time to the present-day U.S. state of Georgia. The area was inhabited by Native American tribes for thousands of years. A modest Spanish presence was established in the late 16th century, mostly centered on Catholic missions. The Spanish had largely withdrawn from the territory by the early 18th century, although they had settlements in nearby Florida. They had little influence historically in what would become Georgia. (Most Spanish place names in Georgia date from the 19th century, not from the age of colonization.)
Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732. The initial impetus behind Georgia’s founding came from James Oglethorpe, who envisioned the new colony as a refuge for the debtors who crowded London prisons; however, no such prisoners were among the initial settlers. Military concerns were a far more motivating force for the British government, which wanted Georgia (named for King George II) as a buffer zone to protect South Carolina and its other southern colonies against incursions from Florida by the Spanish, Britain’s greatest rival for North American territory. As a result, a series of fortifications was built along the coast, and on several occasions, most notably the Battle of Bloody Marsh on St. Simons Island, British troops that were commanded and financed by Oglethorpe kept the Spanish at bay.
European Americans began to settle in Georgia, although it was territory of both the Creek and the Cherokee nations. They pressured state and the federal government to remove the Indians. After Indian Removal in the 1830s, under President Jackson, the pace of settlement by European Americans increased rapidly. The new cotton gin, invented at the end of the 18th century, enabled the profitable processing of short-staple cotton, which could now be grown in the inland and upcountry regions. This change stimulated the cotton boom in Georgia and much of the Deep South, resulting in cotton being a main economic driver, cultivated on slave labor. Based on enslaved labor, planters cleared and developed large cotton plantations. Many became immensely wealthy, but most of the yeomen whites did not own slaves and worked family subsistence farms.

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Overview of Atlanta - Section 03

The history of Atlanta dates back to 1836, when Georgia decided to build a railroad to the U.S. Midwest and a location was chosen to be the line's terminus. The stake marking the founding of (Terminus) was drive into the ground in 1837 (called the Zero Mile Post). In 1839, homes and a store were built there and the settlement grew. Between 1845 and 1854, rail lines arrived from four different directions, and the rapidly growing town quickly became the rail hub for the entire Southern United States. During the American Civil War, Atlanta, as a distribution hub, became the target of a major Union campaign, and in 1864, Union William Sherman's troops set on fire and destroyed the city's assets and buildings, save churches and hospitals. After the war, the population grew rapidly, as did manufacturing, while the city retained its role as a rail hub. Coca-Cola was launched here in 1886 and grew into an Atlanta-based world empire. Electric streetcars arrived in 1889, and the city added new "streetcar suburbs".
The city's elite black colleges were founded between 1865 and 1885, and despite disenfranchisement and the later imposition of Jim Crow laws in the 1910s, a prosperous black middle class and upper class emerged. By the early 20th century, "Sweet" Auburn Avenue was called "the most prosperous Negro street in the nation". In the 1950s, black people started moving into city neighborhoods that had previously kept them out, while Atlanta's first freeways enabled large numbers of whites to move to, and commute from, new suburbs. Atlanta was home to Martin Luther King Jr., and a major center for the Civil Rights Movement. Resulting desegregation occurred in stages over the 1960s. Slums were razed and the new Atlanta Housing Authority built public-housing projects.
From the mid-1960s to mid-'1970s, nine suburban malls opened, and the downtown shopping district declined, but just north of it, gleaming office towers and hotels rose, and in 1976, the new Georgia World Congress Center signaled Atlanta's rise as a major convention city. In 1973, the city elected its first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, and in ensuing decades, black political leaders worked successfully with the white business community to promote business growth, while still empowering black businesses. From the mid-1970s to mid-1980s most of the MARTA rapid transit system was built. While the suburbs grew rapidly, much of the city itself deteriorated and the city lost 21% of its population between 1970 and 1990.
In 1996, Atlanta hosted the Summer Olympics, for which new facilities and infrastructure were built. Hometown airline Delta continued to grow, and by 1998-1999, Atlanta's airport was the busiest in the world. Since the mid-1990s, gentrification has given new life to many of the city's intown neighborhoods. The 2010 census showed affluent black people leaving the city for newer exurban properties and growing suburban towns, younger whites moving back to the city, and a much more diverse metropolitan area with heaviest growth in the exurbs at its outer edges.