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Lost Cause Religion

Near the end of the Civil War (1861-65), women from Columbus began to care for soldiers' graves. One of them, Lizzie Rutherford, proposed an annual observance to decorate graves, inaugurating Confederate Memorial Day. Thirty years later one of the Columbus women compared their work to that of Mary Magdalene and the other women who came to Christ's grave. In a way, this was an apt comparison, for what the women in Columbus were engaged in was no less than a new form of southern religion. Historians refer to this as Lost Cause religion, which was interdenominational and functioned as a...

Lev T. Mills (b. 1940)

Lev T. Mills was born in 1940 in Tallahassee, Florida, and received a Bachelor of Arts from Florida A&M University, a Master of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a p...

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Updated For Educators Page

The New Georgia Encyclopedia's For Educators page has been updated with the Georgia Standards of Excellence, with went in...

English Trade in Deerskins and Indian Slaves

When the English came to America, the Native Americans of Georgia encountered one of the most profound forces for change: the world economy. European merchants ushered in this new economic system with a commercial trade in dressed animal skins bu...

Whitfield County

Whitfield County is located in northwest Georgia at the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains, about thirty miles south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and eighty miles north of Atlanta...