John Wesley lost his labor of love when he came to Georgia. The founder of the Methodist Church was born in England in 1703, becoming a strict man of God who spread the faith throughout England and America. Ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church in his mid-20s, Wesley and his brother Charles studied […]
An African-American with a best-selling novel — a book that was turned into a movie — that was unheard of in the America of the late 1940s. Yet Frank Yerby did just that. Born in Augusta in 1916 to racially mixed parents, Yerby, all his life, had trouble being accepted in either black or white […]
They were the quintessential college rock band of the 1980s, working in the town Rolling Stone called “the best college music scene in the country.” Michael Stipe was an art student at the University of Georgia when he met Peter Buck at the Wuxtry Record Store in Athens. Together with Mike Mills and Bill Berry, […]
He was the last Georgia governor who answered to the King. James Wright, born in London in 1716, came to South Carolina as a teenager when his father became the colony’s chief justice. In 1760, he was named by King George III as the third royal governor of Georgia. He thoroughly invested in the colony, […]
Known affectionately as the “Mouth of the South, he created a TV and sports empire that dramatically altered the media landscape. Robert Edward “Ted” Turner was born in Cincinnati in 1938. When he was nine, his family moved to Savannah. Turner took over his father’s billboard company after his father’s suicide and began expanding the […]
It was an international crisis that tarnished America’s global prestige and helped make Jimmy Carter a one-term president. The Iranian Hostage Crisis began in 1979 when Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage. It didn’t end for more than a year. Iran’s Islamic revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran, who […]
He was one of the most powerful Americans of the 20th century and served in public office for more than half of it. Richard Brevard Russell, Jr., born in Winder in 1897, graduated from the University of Georgia’s Law School. He immediately entered politics, winning election to the state legislature at 23. At 33, he […]
She was partially deaf, suffered from depression, and had no children of her own, yet she founded the Girl Scouts of America. Juliette Gordon Low was born into wealth in Savannah in 1860. Two accidents in her twenties left her partially deaf and led to bouts of depression. At 26, Gordon married William Low, a […]
Its unmatched beauty has been around for millennia, but the largest of Georgia’s Barrier Islands only became a National Seashore on this day in 1972. Cumberland Island is the southernmost of Georgia’s Sea Islands. This magical place is noted for having several unique ecological systems: beaches and dunes, inland maritime forests, and saltwater marshes. The […]
Our state still bears his name, but George II never set foot here. He was born in Germany, and when he succeeded his father, George I, in 1727, he became the second of Britain’s Hanoverian German kings. George II signed the charter creating the colony of Georgia in 1732. James Oglethorpe persuaded the king that […]
