The History of the Medical College of Georgia


Book Description

Phinizy Spalding traces the development of Georgia's oldest medical school from the initial plans of a small group of physicians to the five school complex found in Augusta in the late 1980s. Charting a course filled with great achievement and near-fatal adversity, Spalding shows how the life of the college has been intimately bound to the local community, state politics, and the national medical establishment. When the Medical Academy of Georgia opened its doors in 1828 to a class of seven students, the total number of degreed physicians in the state was fewer than one hundred. Spalding traces the history of the Academy through its early robust growth in the antebellum years; its slowed progress during the Civil War; its decline and hardships during the early half of the twentieth century; and finally its resurgence and a new era of optimism starting in the 1950s.




Beyond Atlanta


Book Description

This text draws on interviews with almost 200 people, both black and white, who worked for, or actively resisted, the freedom movement in Georgia. Beginning before and continuing after the years of direct action protest in the 1960s, the book makes clearthe exhorbitant cost of racial oppression.




College Life in the Old South


Book Description

Relates the early history of the University of Georgia from its founding in 1785 through the Reconstruction era. In this history of America's first chartered state university, the author recounts, among other things, how Athens was chosen as the university's location; how the state tried to close the university and refused to give it a fixed allowance until long after the Civil War; the early rules and how students invariably broke them; the days when the Phi Kappa and Demosthenian literary societies ruled the campus; and the vast commencement crowds that overwhelmed Athens to feast on oratory and watermelons.







The University of Georgia


Book Description

Thomas G. Dyer’s definitive history of the University of Georgia celebrates the bicentennial of the school’s founding with a richly varied account of people and events. More than an institutional history, The University of Georgia is a contribution to the understanding of the course and development of higher education in the South. The Georgia legislature in January 1785 approved a charter establishing “a public seat of learning in this state.” For the next sixteen years the university’s trustees struggled to convert its endowment--forty thousand acres of land in the backwoods--into enough money to support a school. By 1801 the university had a president, a campus on the edge of Indian country, and a few students. Over the next two centuries the small liberal arts college that educated the sons of lawyers and planters grew into a major research university whose influence extends far beyond the boundaries of the state. The course of that growth has not always been smooth. This volume includes careful analyses of turning points in the university’s history: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of land-grant colleges, the coming of intercollegiate athletics, the admission of women to undergraduate programs, the enrollment of thousands of World War II veterans, and desegregation. All are considered in the context of what was occurring elsewhere in the South and in the nation.




Cool Town


Book Description

In the summer of 1978, the B-52's conquered the New York underground. A year later, the band's self-titled debut album burst onto the Billboard charts, capturing the imagination of fans and music critics worldwide. The fact that the group had formed in the sleepy southern college town of Athens, Georgia, only increased the fascination. Soon, more Athens bands followed the B-52's into the vanguard of the new American music that would come to be known as "alternative," including R.E.M., who catapulted over the course of the 1980s to the top of the musical mainstream. As acts like the B-52's, R.E.M., and Pylon drew the eyes of New York tastemakers southward, they discovered in Athens an unexpected mecca of music, experimental art, DIY spirit, and progressive politics--a creative underground as vibrant as any to be found in the country's major cities. In Athens in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian's eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way. In a story full of music and brimming with hope, Hale shows how an unlikely cast of characters in an unlikely place made a surprising and beautiful new world.




History and Reminiscences of the University of Georgia


Book Description

Vince Dooley and Steve Penley come together in their third collaboration (after Dooley's Playbook and Vince Dooley's Garden), this time telling the story of the University of Georgia, the place they both love most. Vince Dooley is uniquely positioned to tell the history of the University of Georgia. As head football coach and athletics director, Dooley served the university under five presidents, and he turns often to personal observations and anecdotes to inform readers. A masterful storyteller and a lifelong learner with a master's degree in history, Dooley weaves a compelling narrative of more than two centuries of history at the university. Renowned American artist Steve Penley may be best known for his paintings of historical icons, but his love for the University of Georgia pours out of every visual interpretation. With strong brush strokes and bold colors, Penley presents the university and its history as only he can.




Jimmy Carter, American Moralist


Book Description

A biography of the former president uses interviews and research to draw a fresh portrait of the human rights activist and traces the religious and political forces that shaped him




Flannery O'Connor's South


Book Description

Flannery O'Connor's South offers a forceful analysis, both literary and philosophical, of Flannery O'Connor's life and literature. First published in 1980, this study draws upon Robert Coles' personal experiences in the South during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, his brief acquaintance with Flannery O'Connor, and his careful readings of her works. The voices and gestures of the people Coles met in the South help illuminate the social scene that influenced one of the region's most valuable and interesting writers.