Georgia.
The Peach
State.

The Cherokee, Creek (Muscogee), Yuchi, and Catawba peoples inhabited Georgia for millennia. James Oglethorpe established Savannah in 1733 as the last of the original thirteen colonies — a planned city of squares and trust lots, founded as a philanthropic experiment to give England’s debtors a fresh start. Oglethorpe banned slavery and rum, believing both would corrupt his utopia. The trustees were overruled within two decades, and Georgia became a slave society indistinguishable from its neighbors.

Georgia ratified the Constitution on January 2, 1788, becoming the fourth state. The invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney on a Georgia plantation in 1793 transformed the entire South — suddenly short-staple cotton was profitable everywhere, and the demand for enslaved labor exploded. Georgia’s Cherokee Nation, one of the most acculturated Native nations in America — with a written language, a newspaper, and a constitution — was forcibly removed in the Trail of Tears of 1838–39 despite a Supreme Court ruling in their favor that President Jackson refused to enforce.

Georgia was a Confederate heartland. Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864 cut a 300-mile swath of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah, deliberately breaking the Confederate supply chain and the Southern will to fight. Atlanta was burned and rebuilt. Savannah was spared — Sherman sent Lincoln a telegram offering the city as a Christmas gift. The war left Georgia devastated, and Reconstruction was brutal and brief. The convict leasing system that replaced slavery trapped thousands of Black Georgians in forced labor on railroads, mines, and turpentine camps well into the twentieth century.

Atlanta rose from its ashes with relentless ambition. Henry Grady’s “New South” vision promoted industrialization and reconciliation while carefully preserving white supremacy. Atlanta became home to a remarkable Black middle class — Auburn Avenue, “Sweet Auburn,” was the wealthiest Black street in America in the early twentieth century. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on Auburn Avenue in 1929, educated at Morehouse College, and returned to lead Ebenezer Baptist Church before the Civil Rights Movement carried him across the South and the world.

Modern Georgia is a study in contrasts. Atlanta is an international city — the busiest airport in the world, headquarters of CNN, Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola, and the CDC — with a majority-Black population and a political culture that swings statewide elections. Beyond the perimeter highway, Georgia remains largely rural: pine timber, poultry farms, peanut fields, and peach orchards stretching to the sea. The Okefenokee Swamp along the Florida border is one of the largest intact freshwater ecosystems in North America. Georgia’s 159 counties hold all of this at once.