Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia

Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia

Author: Ernest C. Hynds

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0820334464

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Published in 1974, Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia is a chronicle of sixty years of change in Clarke County and the city of Athens. In 1801, Clarke County, newly created from Jackson County, was virtually all Georgia farmland, and Athens was a portion of land set aside for the establishment of a state university. In those first years of the century, the university began with thirty or forty students. They received instruction from Josiah Meigs--president and faculty of the university--in a twenty-by-twenty-foot log cabin. By 1846, the population of the county was over four thousand, and the area prospered. Cotton mills dotted the banks of the Oconee River, the Georgia Railroad connected Athens with Augusta, numerous schools and churches had been established, and newspapers, banks, and small businesses were all part of the Athens scene. Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia is rich with detail. This historical narrative recalls not only the growth of industry, government, and education within Clarke County, but also contains many anecdotes of the early people who lived there. The chronology of dates and events and the comprehensive listing of public officials, professional men, planters, and businessmen found in the appendixes of Antebellum Athens and Clarke County, Georgia add to the value of this work of local history.


Transition to an Industrial South

Transition to an Industrial South

Author: Michael J. Gagnon

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2012-10-12

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0807145084

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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.


A Portrait of Historic Athens & Clarke County

A Portrait of Historic Athens & Clarke County

Author: Frances Taliaferro Thomas

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0820330442

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Athens, Georgia, seems the quintessential southern university town. With a geography chiseled over geologic time by its lifeblood, the slow-flowing Oconee River, Athens has developed a unique culture as the two-century-long home of the state's bustling center of learning and research, the University of Georgia. A multitude of influences have powered the emergence of Athens from its eighteenth-century rustic solitude to its current incarnation as a community striving to preserve the old while embracing the new. A Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County gives equal attention to Athens's natural and built environments and their coevolution into one of the modern South's most dynamic small cities. Starting with the town's beginnings, Frances Taliaferro Thomas emphasizes settlement patterns, key events, institutions, architecture, landscape, economics, and the highly distinctive personalities that have molded Athens into what it is today. This edition includes two new sections of color photographs as well as a comprehensive new chapter tracing the milestones that led town and gown into the twenty-first century. Topics include the emerging cultural importance of the Classic Center; restoration and revitalization of many historic sites; vast building projects under two presidents of the University of Georgia; the progression of the greenway along the North Oconee River; and initiatives to address rising poverty rates within the county. Blending scholarly research with archival materials, official data, newspaper accounts, interviews, and personal letters and diaries, A Portrait of Historic Athens and Clarke County is the definitive account of a place that makes history each and every day.


The Mind of the Master Class

The Mind of the Master Class

Author: Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-10-17

Total Pages: 843

ISBN-13: 0521850657

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Presenting America's slaveholders as men and women who were intelligent, honourable, and pious, this text asks how people who were admirable in so many ways could have presided over a social system that proved itself and enormity and inflicted horrors on their slaves.


The Courthouse and the Depot

The Courthouse and the Depot

Author: Wilber W. Caldwell

Publisher: Mercer University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 634

ISBN-13: 9780865547483

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Their songs insist that the arrival of the railroad and the appearance of the tiny depot often created such hope that it inspired the construction of the architectural extravaganzas that were the courthouses of the era. In these buildings the distorted myth of the Old South collided head-on with the equally deformed myth of the New South."


Cultivating Race

Cultivating Race

Author: Watson W. Jennison

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2012-02-10

Total Pages: 594

ISBN-13: 0813140218

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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.


Through the Arch

Through the Arch

Author: Larry B. Dendy

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2013-09-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0820345067

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Through the Arch captures UGA's colorful past, dynamic present, and promising future in a novel way: by surveying its buildings, structures, and spaces. These physical features are the university's most visible--and some of its most valuable--resources. Yet they are largely overlooked, or treated only passingly, in histories and standard publications about UGA. Through text and photographs, this book places buildings and spaces in the context of UGA's development over more than 225 years. After opening with a brief historical overview of the university, the book profiles over 140 buildings, landmarks, and spaces, their history, appearance, and past and current usage, as well as their namesake, beginning with the oldest structures on North Campus and progressing to the newest facilities on South and East Campus and the emerging Northwest Quadrant. Many profiles are supplemented with sidebars relating traditions, lore, facts, or alumni recollections associated with buildings and spaces. More than just landmarks or static elements of infrastructure, buildings and spaces embody the university's values, cultural heritage, and educational purpose. These facilities--many more than a century old--are where students learn, explore, and grow and where faculty teach, research, and create. They harbor the university's history and traditions, protect its treasures, and hold memories for alumni. The repository for books, documents, artifacts, and tools that contain and convey much of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of human existence, these structures are the legacy of generations. And they are tangible symbols of UGA's commitment to improve our world through education. Guide includes 113 color photos throughout 19 black-and-white historical photos Over 140 profiles of buildings, landmarks, and spaces Supplemental sidebars with traditions, lore, facts, and alumni anecdotes 6 maps


Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South

Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South

Author: Michele Gillespie

Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0826264727

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Covering the late colonial age to World War I and beyond, this collection of essays places the economic history of the American South in an international light by establishing useful comparisons with the larger Atlantic and world economy. In an attempt to dispel long-lasting myths about the South, the essays analyze the economic evolution of the South since the slave era. From this perspective, the conception of a backward, wholly agricultural antebellum South occupied only by wealthy planters, poor whites, and contented slaves has finally given way to one of economic and social dynamism as well as regional prosperity. In a coherent and cohesive progression of subjects, these essays show that the South had been deeply enmeshed in the Atlantic economy since the colonial period and, after the Civil War, retained distinctive needs that caused increasing departure from the course northerners adopted on matters of political economy. This comparative approach also helps explain the motivations behind the political choices made by the South as an eminently export-oriented region. This book shows that the South was not slower to develop with respect to industrialization than either the majority of the northern states, especially in the West, or the countries of Western Europe. In fact, the apparently disappointing performance of the New South's economy appears to be the result of more pervasive and largely uncontrollable trends that affected the national as well as the international economy. Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South makes an important contribution to the economic history of the South and to recent efforts to place American history in a more international context.


Joseph Henry Lumpkin

Joseph Henry Lumpkin

Author: Paul DeForest Hicks

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0820340995

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This biography of Joseph Henry Lumpkin (1799-1867) details the life and work of the man whose senior judgeship on Georgia's Supreme Court spanned more than twenty years and included service as its first Chief Justice. Paul Hicks portrays Lumpkin as both a civic-minded professional and an evangelical Presbyterian reformer. Exploring Lumpkin's important contributions to the institutional development of the Georgia Supreme Court, Hicks discusses Lumpkin's opinions in cases ranging in concern from family conflicts to slavery. He also shows how Lumpkin cleared a way through the thicket of antiquated laws that threatened to strangle the growth of corporate banking and business in Georgia. Treated in depth as well are the evolution of his views on slavery and secession and his involvement in social and economic reform, including temperance, education, African American colonization, and industrialization. Hicks also covers Lumpkin's undergraduate days at the University of Georgia and Princeton, his experiences as a state legislator and successful lawyer, and his family life. Among the family members portrayed are Lumpkin's older brother, Wilson, a two-term governor of Georgia; and Lumpkin's son-in-law, Thomas R. R. Cobb, cofounder with Lumpkin of the University of Georgia Law School. Joseph Henry Lumpkin played an important role in the public life of Georgia during the formative era of American law and the age of sectionalism. Here is a full and compelling portrait of Lumpkin as an individual of both intellect and passion, on and off the bench.