At a time when slavery thrived in the American colonies, Georgia, you may be surprised, was alone in banning it. But it wasn’t a moral decision. The Georgia Trustees prohibited slavery because it conflicted with their vision of small landowners prospering from their own labor. They also wanted Georgia to serve as a military buffer […]
One of the most popular preachers in England and America in the 18th century first arrived in Savannah on this day in 1738. George Whitefield was born in 1714 in England, and educated at Oxford, where he met John and Charles Wesley; together they were the first leaders of the Methodist movement. After the Wesleys […]
Georgia Indians traveling to London in 1734 was hardly an everyday thing. One year after James Oglethorpe founded the Georgia colony, he returned to London to report to the Trustees–and took a group of Georgia’s Yamacraw Indians with him. Led by Chief Tomochichi, they wanted to make requests for education and fair trade directly to […]
The Stamp Act was supposed to raise money to pay off the country’s enormous debt following eight years of war, but instead it started a revolution. The French and Indian War, fought on the North American frontier, cost Britain a king’s ransom, and Parliament thought the American colonists should help pay for it. The Stamp […]
Their arrival in Georgia on this date in 1734 heralded the beginning of one of the most culturally distinctive communities in Georgia. The Catholic Archbishop of Salzburg expelled German Protestants from the region in present-day Austria in 1731, and England’s King George II offered them refuge in the new colony of Georgia. Some 300 Salzburgers […]