Though all of her twenty books are set in Georgia or concern southerners living elsewhere, Anne Rivers Siddons was best known for books about Atlanta and its environs. Two novels, Homeplace (1987) and Nora, Nora (2000), take place in a fictionalized version of Fairburn, her hometown, in Fulton County. She was also the author of two books of nonfiction, Go Straight on Peachtree (1978), a McDonald City Guide to Atlanta, and John Chancellor Makes Me Cry (1975), a series of essays patterned around the changing seasons in Atlanta.

Augustin Smith Clayton was a politician and jurist of national significance in the early nineteenth century. Both Clayton County and the town of Clayton, the seat of Rabun County, are named in his honor, as are major streets in Athens and Lawrenceville. Clayton first gained national prominence in the late 1820s while serving as the judge of original jurisdiction over the cases leading to the removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia.

On June 27, 1864, Kennesaw Mountain, located about twenty miles northwest of Atlanta in Cobb County, became the scene for one of the Atlanta campaign’s major actions in the Civil War (1861-65). Beginning of the Atlanta Campaign One month earlier, Union major general William T. Sherman led a force of three armies from Chattanooga, Tennessee, into Georgia. His objective was the destruction of Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee.

Jimmy Carter's boyhood home and farm in Plains, where the family grew peanuts, are managed today by the National Park Service. Photograph from National Park Service 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.

The election of Plains native Jimmy Carter to the U.S. presidency in 1976 brought members of his immediate and extended family into the public eye. Carter is the oldest of four children born to Earl Carter and Lillian Gordy Carter, as well as the husband of Rosalynn Carter, with whom he has four children. Earl Carter James Earl Carter, called Earl, was born in 1894 in Calhoun County. He attended Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville and served during World War I (1917-18).