A Georgia Unionist who opposed secession and the state’s role in the Confederacy, Joshua Hill served the state as a representative and senator to the United States Congress and was Georgia’s last Republican U.S. Senator until the 1980s. Born and raised in the Abbeville District of northwestern South Carolina, Hill migrated to Monticello, Georgia, around 1830 during the cotton boom in central Georgia. In Monticello, he practiced law alongside his brother and began acquiring large tracts of farmland.

Lamar County's neoclassical courthouse was built in Barnesville in 1931. Previously, the local Masonic Hall was used for court sessions. Photograph by John Trainor The New Georgia Encyclopedia does not hold the copyright for this media resource and can neither grant nor deny permission to republish or reproduce the image online or in print. All requests for permission to publish or reproduce the resource must be submitted to the rights holder.

Longtime Georgia resident and successful professional golfer Larry Nelson has won ten Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) Tour events, including three major championships, as well as nineteen Champions Tour events, among others. He has played on three Ryder Cup teams. In 1990 he was elected to the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame, and in 2006 he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. Larry Gene Nelson was born in Fort Payne, Alabama, on September 10, 1947, to Rudell Fant and Vernon Earl Nelson.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Georgia, like many of its Deep South neighbors, witnessed an unprecedented wave of immigration from abroad. In 1970 Georgia’s foreign-born population was approximately 33,000, or 0.7 percent of the total state population; in 2013 the foreign-born population totaled more than 970,000, or 9.7 percent of the population. Of the various and diverse immigrant groups that relocated to Georgia during those decades, the largest and fastest-growing group was Latino (or Hispanic, an older term that similarly refers to persons of Latin American birth or descent).

The Leo Frank case is one of the most notorious and highly publicized cases in the legal annals of Georgia. A Jewish man in Atlanta was placed on trial and convicted of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for the National Pencil Company, which he managed. Before the lynching of Frank two years later, the case became known throughout the nation. The degree of anti-Semitism involved in Frank’s conviction and subsequent lynching was enough of a factor to have inspired Jews, and others, throughout the country to protest the conviction of an innocent man.