by Christopher C. Meyers (Author), David Williams (Author)
Based on the most recent research, this second edition surveys the people and events that shaped Georgia's history. Beginning with the earliest Native American settlements, the story tells of first contacts between area natives and Spanish from Florida, British from Carolina, and James Oglethorpe leading the effort to found a colony called Georgia. In the following decades, the Creek and Cherokee were driven out as Georgia was transformed into a cotton kingdom dominated by a minority of slaveholders, who finally sought to make slavery perpetual in a war that often pitted Georgians against each other. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the state struggled with the consequences of the conflict. Race relations pervaded the state's history after the Civil War and those struggles are traced from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Era and twenty-first century voter suppression.