We Georgians are a new people as races of men are measured in time, but the land we call our home is an old land. Much has happened here in eons past; massive mountain ranges were upthrust and worn down again before the Rockies and the Andes were ever born; the inflow of mighty oceans and their slow subsiding gave us the patterns and the contours of the land as we know it today. —Harold H. Martin, from the Preface
The authors were asked not for comprehensive chronicles, nor for research monographs or new data for scholars. Bibliographies and footnotes are minimal. Each author was asked for a summing up—interpretive, sensitive, thoughtful, individual, even personal—of what seems significant about his or her state’s history. What distinguishes it? What has mattered about it, to its own people and to the rest of the nation? What has it come to now? —James Morton Smith, General Editor