Georgia (U.S. state)

• 1. Introduction

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  Georgia, the American state that calls itself the Peach State, holds a peculiar distinction: it is simultaneously the 24th-largest state by area and the eighth-most populous, a tension between geographic modesty and human density that shapes everything about it. As of 2025, its population stood at just over 11.3 million people. More than half of them live within the orbit of a single city: the Atlanta metropolitan area, with more than 6.3 million residents, contains about 57 percent of every Georgian alive today.

  The story of how this happened cuts through three centuries of violence, transformation, and reinvention. A colony founded on the idealistic vision of a slavery-free agrarian society became one of the most consequential stages of the American Civil War. A state that once had one of the highest rates of racial terror killings in the South became the birthplace of the civil rights movement's most important leader. A regional backwater rebuilt itself into a global transportation hub, a film production capital, and the headquarters city for some of the largest companies on earth.

  What explains Georgia's particular gravity? How did a place shaped so profoundly by dispossession and racial violence become the state that, in 2020, helped decide the presidency by a margin of fewer than twelve thousand votes? And what does it mean that more than 57 percent of Georgians live within one metropolitan area, while the rest of the state holds its own distinct geography, culture, and political identity?

  Those questions open onto centuries of competing visions for what this place should be.

• 2. A Colony's Contradictions

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  On the 12th of February 1733, British General James Oglethorpe established the Province of Georgia in Savannah, a year after the colony received its royal charter from King George II, for whom it was named. The governing body, called the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America, came to their work with an unusual plan. Their Oglethorpe Plan envisioned an agrarian society built by yeoman farmers, and it explicitly prohibited slavery.

  The prohibition did not survive contact with economic pressure. In 1742, the colony was invaded by the Spanish during the War of Jenkins' Ear. Ten years later, after the government failed to renew the financial subsidies that had kept the enterprise afloat, the Trustees surrendered control to the British Crown. Georgia became a royal colony, its governor appointed by the king of Great Britain, and its antislavery founding principle quietly abandoned.

  Before Europeans arrived, the land had been governed by mound-building polities including Ocute and Coosa. Those indigenous structures had no standing in the colonial order. Georgia's delegates to the Second Continental Congress joined the unanimous vote for the Declaration of Independence, and the state ratified its own first constitution in February 1777. On the 2nd of January 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.

  The new state's relationship with its indigenous population followed a pattern of betrayal. After the Creek War of 1813-1814, General Andrew Jackson compelled the Muscogee tribes to surrender land under the Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814, giving up 21 million acres covering what is now southern Georgia and central Alabama. In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains, launching the Georgia Gold Rush and the establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which operated until 1861. The gold rush intensified pressure on the Cherokee Nation. President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, ordering eastern Indian nations to reservations west of the Mississippi. When the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia in 1832 that U.S. states could not redraw Indian boundaries, Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the decision. In 1838, President Martin Van Buren sent federal troops to carry out the forced deportation. The resulting Trail of Tears killed more than four thousand Cherokees.

• 3. War and Its Aftermath

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  On the 19th of January 1861, Georgia declared its secession from the Union and joined the original seven Confederate States. What followed placed the state at the center of the war's most destructive campaigns. Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta.

  In December 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman led his forces on the March to the Sea, cutting a swath of destruction from Atlanta to Savannah. During the campaign, 18,253 Georgian soldiers were killed, representing roughly one in every five then serving in the Confederacy. The Andersonville Prison, one of the war's most notorious sites, saw nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war die from inhumane conditions and deliberate mistreatment. After the war, the camp's commander Henry Wirz was sentenced to death for war crimes and hanged. He was the highest-ranking Confederate official to be executed.

  Georgia was the last former Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union, on the 15th of July 1870. Federal troops remained stationed in the state until the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. With white Democrats having regained control of the legislature, they passed a poll tax in 1877 that disenfranchised large numbers of poor black and white residents. In 1908, the state established a white primary, another mechanism for excluding black citizens from political participation.

  African Americans had constituted 46.7 percent of Georgia's population in 1900. The combination of political exclusion and racial terror drove tens of thousands to leave during the Great Migration. According to the Equal Justice Initiative's 2015 report covering the period from 1877 to 1950, Georgia recorded 531 lynching deaths, the second-highest total of any state in the South. The overwhelming majority of victims were Black men.

  The second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan was formed at Georgia's Stone Mountain by William Joseph Simmons on the 25th of November 1915. Its revival was partly inflamed by the 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan and the lynching two years later of her convicted killer, Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory supervisor and president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith. That affair led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, which successfully lobbied for Frank to be posthumously pardoned in 1986.

• 4. Civil Rights and Political Power

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  Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, the son of a Baptist minister from the city's educated African-American middle class. He emerged as a national leader of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. In 1957, King joined with others to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, building a political organization to coordinate the movement across the South.

  Georgia's political landscape was simultaneously producing both the architects of racial exclusion and those who fought it. Julian Bond, a civil rights leader, was elected to Georgia's House of Representatives in 1965 and served multiple terms there and later in the State Senate. Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, wrote in support of the civil rights movement. Political disenfranchisement of Black Georgians persisted through the mid-1960s, until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  In 1970, Jimmy Carter, then recently elected as governor, declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972, Georgia elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American congressman from the state since the Reconstruction era.

  For more than 130 years, from 1872 to 2003, Georgians elected only white Democratic governors. The transition came when incumbent moderate Democratic governor Roy Barnes was defeated in 2002 by Republican Sonny Perdue, a former Democrat. Georgia voted Republican in six consecutive presidential elections from 1996 through 2016. That streak ended when Joe Biden carried the state in 2020 by 11,779 votes. The same election cycle produced runoff victories for Jon Ossoff, the state's first Jewish senator, and Raphael Warnock, its first Black senator. Both wins were attributed to the rapid diversification of Atlanta's suburbs and increased turnout among younger African-American voters. In 2022, Republican governor Brian Kemp won reelection by more than 300,000 votes, the largest margin since the early 2000s.

• 5. Atlanta and the New Economy

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  In 1910, a secret meeting was held on Jekyll Island, off Georgia's Atlantic coast, to lay the groundwork for an American central banking system. The discussions that took place there helped lead to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It was an early sign of the state's growing role in national financial infrastructure.

  Construction completed on Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport's expansion in 1980. Today it is the busiest airport in the world by both passenger traffic and aircraft movements, accommodating more than a hundred million passengers annually and employing more than 60,000 people. In 1991, UPS established its headquarters in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, taking advantage of the airport's role as a transportation hub. In 1992, construction finished on Bank of America Plaza, which was at the time the tallest building in the United States outside of New York City or Chicago.

  In 1990, the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics, a recognition of the city's rising international profile. The stadium built for the Olympics was later converted to Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves through 2016. In 2024, it was announced that Atlanta would host multiple games during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

  As of 2025, Georgia's total gross state product was $924.8 billion, with a per capita personal income of $65,382. The state holds a AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's, one of only 15 states to do so. Several Fortune 500 companies maintain their headquarters in Georgia, including Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, and Aflac. The Port of Savannah's Garden City Terminal is the largest single container terminal in North America, handling 4.9 million TEUs in 2023. Georgia has been named the top state for doing business by Area Development Magazine for 12 consecutive years as of 2025.

  The state's film industry has grown to rival California's. Georgia overtook California in 2016 as the state with the most feature films produced on location. In the fiscal year 2017, film and television production generated an economic impact of $9.5 billion. Television shows including Stranger Things and The Walking Dead, and films including Black Panther and Hidden Figures, were shot in Georgia.

• 6. Landscape, Ecology, and Climate

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  Georgia consists of five principal physiographic regions: the Cumberland Plateau, the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Piedmont, and the Atlantic coastal plain. The Blue Ridge is part of the broader Appalachian range and can reach elevations of 4,500 feet above sea level. That elevation shapes the climate of the northern mountain regions significantly, making them cooler and wetter than the coastal and southern portions of the state.

  The majority of Georgia experiences a humid subtropical climate, with hot and humid summers throughout most of the state. Annual precipitation ranges from 45 inches in central Georgia to approximately 75 inches in the northeast. The USDA plant hardiness zones for Georgia run from zone 6b in the Blue Ridge Mountains, with minimum temperatures no colder than -5 degrees Fahrenheit, to zone 8b along the Atlantic coast and Florida border, where the minimum is no colder than 15 degrees Fahrenheit. The highest temperature ever recorded in the state was 112 degrees Fahrenheit in Louisville on the 24th of July 1952. The lowest was -17 degrees Fahrenheit in northern Floyd County on the 27th of January 1940.

  The state supports approximately 250 tree species and 58 protected plant species. Its native trees include red cedar, a variety of pines, oaks, hollies, cypress, sweetgum, and sabal palmetto. East Georgia sits within the subtropical coniferous forest biome. The state's wildlife includes white-tailed deer in nearly all counties, 160 bird species including the northern mockingbird and brown thrasher, and around 79 reptile species and 63 amphibian species. An invasive species, the Argentine black and white tegu, has established itself in Georgia and poses a threat to native wildlife by hunting down and dominating habitats.

  On the 5th of February 1958, a B-47 on a training mission lost a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The Department of Energy believes it lies buried in the silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound, where it remains to this day.

• 7. Culture and Identity

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  Ray Charles recorded "Georgia on My Mind," which became the official state song. Gladys Knight recorded "Midnight Train to Georgia." The city of Athens produced some of the most influential rock music of the 1980s and 1990s, including R.E.M., Widespread Panic, and the B-52's. Since the 1990s, Atlanta has been a center of hip-hop and R&B, with Outkast, Usher, Ludacris, TLC, and others building careers from the city.

  Two films set in Atlanta won the Academy Award for Best Picture: Gone with the Wind in 1939 and Driving Miss Daisy in 1989. Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind, Alice Walker's The Color Purple, and Olive Ann Burns' Cold Sassy Tree are among the novels shaped by Georgia's history and landscape. Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey, Sidney Lanier, and Frank Yerby all lived and worked in the state.

  Georgia's religious landscape reflects its position in the Bible Belt. According to the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of the population identified as Protestant, with the Southern Baptist Convention reporting 1,759,317 adherents in 2010. The state is home to the second-largest Hindu temple in the United States, the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Atlanta, located in the Atlanta suburb of Lilburn. Congregation Mickve Israel in Savannah is among the state's historic synagogues.

  The University of Georgia, founded in 1785, is the oldest state-chartered university in the country and the birthplace of the American system of public higher education. The HOPE Scholarship, funded by the state lottery, is available to all Georgia residents who graduated from high school and maintain a 3.0 grade point average at a public college or university in the state. Georgia has 85 public colleges, universities, and technical colleges, in addition to more than 45 private institutions.

  Georgia's professional sports landscape includes the Atlanta Braves, the Atlanta Falcons, the Atlanta Hawks, and Atlanta United FC. The Masters golf tournament, the first of the PGA Tour's four major championships, is held each year at Augusta National Golf Club. Professional baseball's Ty Cobb, from Narrows, Georgia and nicknamed the "Georgia Peach," was the first player inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.