Charter schools have recently become a hot topic of debate in the United States. For parents who cannot afford private schooling or moving to another school district, charter schools seem to be an attractive option. These schools, which are often argued to outperform traditional schools, offer an alternative path to public education which allows teachers more flexibility to employ innovative strategies in the classroom. In order to expedite the creation of such schools, Republicans in the Georgia General Assembly called for the amending of the Georgia Constitution which would allow the state to approve charters by circumventing the publicly elected local school board. This study analyzes the more recent political history of the Commission, the debate surrounding the amendment, and ultimately the vote itself for Amendment 1.

Georgia statesman Thomas E. Watson is best known as a Vice-Presidential and Presidential candidate for the People’s Party, the progressive third party movement of the 1890s and 1900s. As a Populist candidate, Watson advocated a racially progressive platform in order to appeal to African American voters. But following a series of electoral defeats and the collapse of the Populist Party, Watson retreated from politics and began a career as the publisher of his own weekly and monthly periodicals. As a publisher, Watson utilized his editorial space to express bigoted attitudes towards African Americans, Catholics, and Jews, that greatly contrasted with views he espoused as a Populist. But Watson’s rhetorical shifts occurred during the industrialization, urbanization, and immigration of the South. These radical transformations inspired fear and anxiety for thousands of rural white southerners. Within this context, Watson, as the proprietor of a profit-driven enterprise, offered opinions about the era’s numerous social, political, and economic upheavals that his readership appreciated. Throughout his career, Watson’s rhetoric shifted with the ebb and flow of contextual variation and in this period of intense economic, social, and political change, the context was favorable for the bigoted opinions that he expressed.

Primarily focusing on his political career (1878-1894) and as an unofficial public figure after his retirement from formal politics (1895-1911), this study considers William J. Northen’s efforts in leading Georgia to the vague but resonant ideal of progress by analyzing his combination of religion and politics for social change, modern governance, and economic progress. After Reconstruction, urban middle-class southern Baptists like Northen began to realize the social problems of their civilization. Gradually, these reformers worked to expand their traditional mission of saving indivdual souls into a modern mission of saving the collective soul of society. Whereas personal, localized relationships customarily ordered southern society, under Northen, public policy and an increasingly coercive state informed by Christian princilpes of social outreach began to overtake the role of the individual.

Since the Civil War, historians have tried to understand why eleven southern states seceded from the Union to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America. What compelled the South to favor disunion over union? While enduring stereotypes perpetuated by the Myth of the Lost Cause cast most southerners of the antebellum era as ardent secessionists, not all southerners favored disunion. In addition, not all states were enthusiastic about the prospects of leaving one Union only to join another. Secession and disunion have helped shape the identity of the imagined South, but many Georgians opposed secession. This dissertation examines the life of U.S. Supreme Court Justice James Moore Wayne (1790-1867), a staunch Unionist from Savannah, Georgia. Wayne remained on the U.S. Supreme Court during the American Civil War, and this study explores why he remained loyal to the Union when his home state joined the Confederacy. Examining the nature of Wayne’s Unionism opens many avenues of inquiry into the nature of Georgia’s attitudes toward union and disunion in the antebellum era. By exploring the political, economic and social dimensions of Georgia Unionism and long opposition to secession, this work will add to the growing list of studies of southern Unionists.

Graves discusses the important role that women played in the anti-ERA campaign in Georgia during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a controversial and divisive piece of legislation that polarized both legislators and constituents throughout the United States. Graves uses the anti-ERA campaign in Georgia as a model for studying the women who opposed the ERA on a national level. She writes about the differences between the feminist movement and the conservative grassroots movement, the role that anti-ERA women played in the rise of the New Right, and the legacy of the ERA’s failure in contemporary political context. Graves uses interviews and primary resource documents of the women involved in the campaign as well as a plethora of scholarly materials previously written about the ERA.