The history of Georgia in the United States of America spans pre-Columbian time to the present-day U.S. state of Georgia. The area was inhabited by Aboriginal tribes for thousands of years. A modest Spanish presence was established in the late 16th century, mostly centered on Catholic missions. The Spanish had largely withdrawn from the territory by the early 18th century, although they had settlements in nearby Florida. They had little influence historically in what would become Georgia. (Most Spanish place names in Georgia date from the 19th century, not from the age of colonization.)
Georgia was founded by James Oglethorpe in 1732. Oglethorpe envisioned the new colony as a refuge for the debtors who crowded London prisons; however, no such prisoners were among the initial settlers. Military concerns were a far more motivating force for the British government, which wanted Georgia (named for King George II) as a buffer zone to protect South Carolina and its other southern colonies against incursions from Florida by the Spanish, Britain’s greatest rival for North American territory. As a result, a series of fortifications was built along the coast, and on several occasions, most notably the Battle of Bloody Marsh on St. Simons Island, British troops that were commanded and financed by Oglethorpe kept the Spanish at bay.
European Americans began to settle in Georgia, although it was territory of both the Creek and the Cherokee nations. They pressured state and the federal government to remove the Indians.
On January 19, 1861, Georgia seceded from the Union and on February 8, 1861, joined other Southern states, all slave societies, to form the Confederate States of America. Georgia contributed nearly one hundred twenty thousand soldiers to the Confederacy, with about five thousand Georgians (both black and white) joining the Union Army. The first major battle in the state was the Battle of Chickamauga, a Confederate victory, and the last major Confederate victory in the west. In 1864, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's armies invaded Georgia as part of the Atlanta campaign. The burning of Atlanta (which was a commercially vital railroad hub but not yet the state capital) was followed by Sherman's March to the Sea, which laid waste to a wide swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864. These events became iconic in the state's memory and dealt a devastating economic blow to the entire Confederacy.
After the war, Georgians endured a period of economic hardship. Reconstruction was a period of military occupation. With enfranchisement of freedmen, who allied with the Republican Party, a biracial legislature was elected. It established public education and welfare institutions for the first time in the state, and initiated economic programs. Reconstruction ended in 1875 after white Democrats regained political control of the state, through violence and intimidation at elections. They passed new laws and constitutional amendments that disenfranchised blacks and many poor whites near the turn of the century. In the Jim Crow era from the late 19th century to 1964, blacks were suppressed as second-class citizens, nearly excluded from politics. Thousands of blacks migrated North to escape these conditions and associated violence. The state was predominately rural,
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