Georgia was founded in 1733 to give new lives to deserving non-Roman Catholics in the New World. Despite involvements of Georgia's founder, James Oglethorpe, with debtors prisons, no debtors and no criminals were allowed to be sent to Georgia. The myth that Georgia was a debtors' colony or a type of Botany Bay seems impossible to lay to rest with the truth.

Trustees of the colony sent about 5,000 persons from Great Britain to Georgia, and information about those colonists is published in E. Merton Coulter and Albert B. Saye, A List of the Early Settlers of Georgia (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1949). Each colonist received fifty acres of land, while those who paid their own passage might have received up to 500 acres.

The Salzburgers, central European Protestants, became the first non-British group to settle in Georgia beginning in 1734. They established themselves at Ebenezer in what is now Effingham County. After Georgia became a royal province in 1753, settlers began to move in from Virginia and the Carolinas in large numbers. Other immigrants included Piedmontese from Italy, Scots-Highlanders, Swiss, and Portuguese Jews.

When the Revolutionary War began, Georgia consisted of twelve parishes (these did not function as governments, however) and a large area of ceded lands which the Cherokee and Creek Indians had turned over to the colony in 1773. Georgia's first constitution, dated 1777, provided for the creation of Wilkes, Richmond, Burke, Effingham, Chatham, Liberty, Glynn, and Camden counties. In 1784 Washington and Franklin counties were organized. By 1820 Georgia established fifty counties, mostly from the area that comprised the original ten counties.

The Civil War left Georgia devastated with enormous strains upon the state's few factories and fragile railroad system. Factories and foundries of Atlanta, Griswaldville, Rome, and Roswell were completely destroyed. Millions of dollars in capital was lost by the emancipation of slaves. The soil was worn out and farm animals were gone.

The end of the war did not bring immediate recovery. Federal direct taxes added to the burden. Thousands of people, black and white, were displaced or missed in the 1870 federal census. Economic and social pressures led to racial conflict. 

The decades following the war brought Georgia its last wave of nineteenth-century migration. North Carolinians came south to take advantage of the pine forests for turpentine and naval stores. Lumber, marble, granite, coal, and kaoline became major businesses, but cotton remained "king" through much of the twentieth century.

Atlanta recovered almost immediately after the Civil War as a transportation center. Today, it is still the hub of the South, with interstate roads, interstate railways, and air travel. The growth of Atlanta has been explosive, producing two distinct parts of Georgia-Atlanta and its suburbs as a modern, industrial, urban complex with many people born outside the state; and the rest of the state, which remains rural with declining population and wealth.