Course Description

Instructor: Wendy Venet

Atlanta has been called many things:  "a city built on hard work, hot air, and bluster"; "a city too busy to hate"; "a Black Mecca" or "a Black bubble," or "a Dream Deferred."  How did Atlanta become the city it is today?  This course engages Atlanta history by focusing on four turning points per class.  The class begins with the founding of Atlanta in 1837 and ends with the Olympic Games in 1996.

Bio:  Retired professor from Georgia State University. A specialist in Nineteenth Century U.S. history, she published several books centered on women’s history, including Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War and A Strong-Minded Woman: The Life of Mary Livermore. In more recent years her research has focused on Atlanta during the Civil War Era. Her publications include Sam Richards’s Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front (an edited work), A Changing Wind: Commerce and Conflict in Civil War Atlanta, and Gone but not Forgotten: Atlantans Commemorate the Civil War. Additionally, she assisted with The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, volume 16, edited by John Y. Simon. As an Advisory Board member, she helped to conceptualize exhibits for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum and Library in Springfield, Illinois, which opened in 2005. She worked with the Atlanta History Center in developing a script for the renovated Atlanta Cyclorama (2019).