Short answers, pulled from the story.
Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution on the 2nd of January 1788. It had previously been established as a British colony in 1732, with its first settlement at Savannah founded in 1733, and was the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies.
As of 2025, Georgia's estimated population was 11,302,748. About 57 percent of the state's residents live within the Atlanta metropolitan area, which had a population of more than 6.3 million in 2023, making it the eighth most populous metropolitan area in the United States.
President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, ordering eastern Indian nations including Georgia's Cherokee to reservations west of the Mississippi. Despite a 1832 Supreme Court ruling in Worcester v. Georgia that states could not redraw Indian boundaries, the federal government and Georgia ignored the decision. In 1838, President Martin Van Buren dispatched federal troops to carry out the forced relocation known as the Trail of Tears, which killed more than four thousand Cherokees.
As of 2025, Georgia's total gross state product was $924.8 billion. Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Georgia include Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, and Aflac. The state holds a AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's and has been named the top state for doing business by Area Development Magazine for 12 consecutive years as of 2025. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the world's busiest by both passenger traffic and aircraft movements.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta and emerged as a national civil rights leader in the 1950s. In 1957, King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta to coordinate political action across the South. Georgia also had one of the highest rates of racial terror killings in the South, recording 531 lynching deaths between 1877 and 1950 according to the Equal Justice Initiative's 2015 report. Political disenfranchisement of Black Georgians persisted until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Georgia overtook California in 2016 as the state with the most feature films produced on location. In fiscal year 2017, film and television production had an economic impact of $9.5 billion on the state. Since 1972, more than eight hundred films and 1,500 television shows have been filmed in Georgia, including Black Panther, Hidden Figures, Forrest Gump, and The Walking Dead.