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.

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.

These Men She Gave
These Men She Gave

Author: John F. Stegeman

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0820334588

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These Men She Gave tells the story of Athens, Georgia, during the turbulent years of the Civil War. John F. Stegeman details the many changes Athens and Clarke County underwent during the war. The community was highly involved with the seccession movement and the formation of the Confederacy. Stegeman tells how the town was able to escape destruction on an August day in 1864 when the Civil War came to the area and how the town would eventually lose many men to the war. The book includes appendices that include information such as a list of the members of the Ladies Aid Society in 1961, a roster of Clarke County companies in the army of Northern Virginia, and mortality lists of Clarke County troops in major battles.

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.

Cool Town
Cool Town

Author: Grace Elizabeth Hale

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-02-13

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1469654881

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In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.

Georgia Women
Georgia Women

Author: Ann Short Chirhart

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-10

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0820339008

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This first of two volumes extends from the founding of the colony of Georgia in 1733 up to the Progressive era. From the beginning, Georgia women were instrumental in shaping the state, yet most histories minimize their contributions. The essays in this volume include women of many ethnicities and classes who played an important role in Georgia’s history. Though sources for understanding the lives of women in Georgia during the colonial period are scarce, the early essays profile Mary Musgrove, an important player in the relations between the Creek nation and the British Crown, and the loyalist Elizabeth Johnston, who left Georgia for Nova Scotia in 1806. Another essay examines the near-mythical quality of the American Revolution-era accounts of "Georgia's War Woman," Nancy Hart. The later essays are multifaceted in their examination of the way different women experienced Georgia's antebellum social and political life, the tumult of the Civil War, and the lingering consequences of both the conflict itself and Emancipation. After the war, both necessity and opportunity changed women's lives, as educated white women like Eliza Andrews established or taught in schools and as African American women like Lucy Craft Laney, who later founded the Haines Institute, attended school for the first time. Georgia Women also profiles reform-minded women like Mary Latimer McLendon, Rebecca Latimer Felton, Mildred Rutherford, Nellie Peters Black, and Martha Berry, who worked tirelessly for causes ranging from temperance to suffrage to education. The stories of the women portrayed in this volume provide valuable glimpses into the lives and experiences of all Georgia women during the first century and a half of the state's existence. Historical figures include: Mary Musgrove Nancy Hart Elizabeth Lichtenstein Johnston Ellen Craft Fanny Kemble Frances Butler Leigh Susie King Taylor Eliza Frances Andrews Amanda America Dickson Mary Ann Harris Gay Rebecca Latimer Felton Mary Latimer McLendon Mildred Lewis Rutherford Nellie Peters Black Lucy Craft Laney Martha Berry Corra Harris Juliette Gordon Low

The New Georgia Guide
The New Georgia Guide

Author: University of Georgia Press

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 828

ISBN-13: 9780820317984

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The Georgia Humanities Council presents a guidebook with cultural, historical, and regional coverage of Georgia