Related Resources

This page includes additional resources on the state of Georgia from the Library's website.

American Folklife Center State Resources

American Folklife Center Collections: Georgia
American Folklife Center (AFC) collections from the U.S. state of Georgia document expressive culture from nearly every corner of the state and span nearly a century. Beginning with Robert Winslow Gordon's documentation of Gullah-Geechee culture in Darian, Georgia, and continuing with StoryCorps interviews made today, AFC collections illustrate the rich variety of folklife found in this state.

Bibliographies and Guides

Resources for Local History and Genealogy: Georgia
Compiled by Reference Specialists in the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room, this site identifies key resources for pursuing family history, and state, county and municipal historical research by state.
U.S. State Poets Laureate: Georgia
This site provides the names of all current state poets laureate of the United States. It also includes a history of the laureateship in each state, as well the District of Columbia, and attempts to provide a comprehensive listing of all prior state poets laureate. Included is information on the position of State Poet Laureate in Georgia.

Exhibitions Featuring Georgia

American Treasures of the Library of Congress

The American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition is an exhibition of the rarest, most interesting or significant items relating to America’s past, drawn from every corner of the world’s largest library.

The American Negro Exhibit
Featured is an occupational pie chart demonstrating that African Americans were engaged in the same basic employment as whites and a graph highlighting the diversity of African American businesses in 1900. It was prepared at Atlanta University where W.E.B. Du Bois was a professor of sociology at the time.
Bartram’s Travels
Bartram travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida.
Cherokee Nation Denied Foreign Nation Status
In the landmark case, The Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia, the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1831 that the Cherokee Indian Nation was not a foreign nation and therefore ruled that the Supreme Court did not have jurisdiction. The result was that the Cherokee Nation’s land cessions were allowed to stand, and they were denied the right to sue in federal court to prevent their removal from tribal lands. Associate Justice Smith Thompson wrote a dissenting opinion upholding the claims of the Cherokee Nation. This manuscript is Justice Thompson’s retained copy of his dissenting opinion.
Civil Rights
Includes photographs taken in Georgia by Danny Lyon, the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The Failure to Retake Savannah
Pierre Ozanne was a marine artist assigned to the French fleet during the American Revolution. The map and its lengthy legend and notes recount the combined American troops and French fleet’s failure to retake Savannah in 1779. It shows the locations of the French and American camps, lines of march, the Spring Hill redoubt where the major action took place, and cultural features such as a Jewish cemetery and a hospital.
A Georgia Courthouse
This photograph of the interior of Green County Courthouse in Greensboro, Georgia, is by photographer Stephen Shore.
Photograph Album for the Paris Exposition
For the Paris Exposition Universelle, W.E.B. Du Bois assembled a unique set of photographic albums for display. These four unique volumes are titled Types of American Negroes (volumes 1-3) and Negro Life in Georgia (volume 4).
Plan of Savannah
In 1733, James Edward Oglethorpe planned Georgia's first European settlement around several small squares, designed to defend settlers against invasion from Native Americans and the Spanish.

Global Gateway

France In America
Conceived in partnership with France’s national library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, France in America /France en Amérique is a bilingual digital library made available by the Library of Congress. It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century. Search the project of find items related to Georgia, including a map of Georgia, from the Latest Authorities.
Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier
Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier is a bilingual, multi-format English-Spanish digital library site that explores the interactions between Spain and the United States in America from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Search the project to find items related to Georgia, including a 1742 document offering historical proof of Spanish title to Georgia.

Historic Newspapers

Chronicling America: Georgia
Historic American newspapers from 1789 to 1963 selected and contributed by state partners in the National Digital Newspaper Program. Search this collection to find selected newspaper articles that mention events in Georgia.

Law Library

The Guide to Law Online: Georgia
The Guide to Law Online, prepared by the Law Library of Congress Public Services Division, is an annotated guide to sources of information on government and law available online. It includes selected links to useful and reliable sites for legal information on U.S states and territories, including Georgia.

Resources for Teachers

The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching. Find Library of Congress lesson plans and more that meet Common Core standards, state content standards, and the standards of national organizations.

Features & Activities

American Memory Timeline
A comprehensive look at America's history through primary sources. Explore documents relating to the establishment of the Georgia Colony.
Primary Sources by State: Georgia
The Library of Congress has rich documents and artifacts from every state, the U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia.

Lesson Plans

Creating a Primary Source Archive: All History Is Local
Examine the interplay between national, state, local, and personal history. Students produce a digital collection of primary sources from their family or local community based on the Digital Collections.
Exploring Community Through Local History: Oral Stories, Landmarks and Traditions
Students explore the local history of the community in which they live through written and spoken stories; through landmarks such as buildings, parks, restaurants, or businesses; and through traditions such as food, festivals and other events of the community or of individual families.
Local History: Mapping My Spot
Students create their town’s history for coming generations and place themselves on the map in a literal as well as figurative sense, by producing portions of an updated version of an early twentieth century panoramic map from the Digital Collections.

Today in History

The following dates in history feature significant events in Georgia's history as highlighted in the Library of Congress collections.

March 3
On March 3, 1859, journalist Q. K. Philander Doesticks (Mortimer Thomson) attended an auction of 436 men, women, and children formerly held by Pierce M. Butler. Butler’s slaves were auctioned in order to pay debts incurred in gambling and the financial crash of 1857-58. Doesticks’ account, What Became of the Slaves on a Georgia Plantation?, includes vivid descriptions of the largest recorded slave auction in U.S. history. The grim sale, which took place over two rainy days on the eve of the Civil War, was referred to as “The Weeping Time.”
May 8
Dr. John S. Pemberton, a pharmacist and inventor of patent medicines, sold the first Coca-Cola on May 8, 1886, at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia. Pemberton’s bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, coined the name and it is his handwriting we recognize as the Coca-Cola trademark. Originally marketed as a tonic, the drink contained extracts of coca leaf, which includes cocaine, as well as the caffeine-rich kola nut.
September 18
On September 18, 1895, Booker T. Washington delivered his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the opening of the Cotton States and International Exhibition in Atlanta, Georgia. Washington, the founder and president of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, was the first African-American man ever to address a racially-mixed Southern audience.

Veterans History Project

The Veterans History Project (VHP) collects and preserves the remembrances of American war veterans and civilian workers who supported them. Click on the link below to locate veterans from Georgia.

Veterans History Project: Georgia

Georgia: State Resource Guide

Digital Collections: Ask a Librarian