Atlanta

Atlanta, the capital of Georgia, is also an economic and cultural center of the southeastern United States. The city is perhaps best known for its role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, football's annual Peach Bowl, the 1996 Summer Olympics, and the Civil War events depicted in the 1936 novel (and 1939 film adaptation) Gone with the Wind. Atlanta's quick recovery from its wartime destruction was only the most dramatic of its reinventions. Accordingly, the city's official symbol is the phoenix, the mythological firebird that rises from the ashes.

Landscape

Atlanta lies at an average elevation of 850 to 1100 feet in the southern Piedmont or Appalachian foothill region of northwestern Georgia, just over 250 miles (402 kilometers) north of the Gulf of Mexico and about 315 miles (507 kilometers) due west of the Atlantic Ocean. The city proper covers 134 square miles (347 square kilometers), while the Atlanta metropolitan area spreads out for more than 8,000 square miles (20,700 square kilometers). The nickname "City of Trees" still applies to Atlanta, although unchecked sprawl has destroyed 60 percent of the area's original forest cover, chiefly pines mixed with deciduous hardwoods. Despite wetland loss, the area remains full of ponds, creeks, lakes, and rivers, including the Chattahoochee and Alcovy Rivers.

Atlanta proper lies almost entirely within Fulton County. The metropolitan area, with its twenty-eight counties and over 110 municipalities, is a huge "sprawlplex" made possible by the convergence of Interstates 20, 75/85, and 285. I-285 forms a beltway that Atlantans have dubbed the "Perimeter." About 80 percent of Atlantans live and work outside of this border.

Atlanta's Piedmont location moderates its climate somewhat. Yet, as the nickname "Hotlanta" reveals, it does not escape the Southeast's famously steamy summers. Air pollution is an increasingly serious issue, especially when hot, humid air combines with the abundant pollen and automobile exhaust. Autumn tends to be pleasantly warm, and winter brings few snow or ice storms. Despite the chance for thunderstorms and tornadoes, spring weather is often sunny and comfortably warm. Due to climate change, Atlanta experienced hotter days and more rainfall, and the city was also at higher risk for more intense and dangerous hurricanes.

People

According to the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) in 2024, Atlanta's estimated population of 520,066 is predomintately Black or African American, who accounted for 43.4 percent of the total populace. White residents accounted for 37.8 percent, while about 5.5 percent were Asian or Asian American, and 5.5 percent identified as multiracial. About 7.1 percent identified as Hispanic or Latino, regardless of race. The combined metropolitan area's population exceeds five million, and the suburbs outside the city itself are predominantly White. Regional speech and cuisine thrive alongside Atlanta's culturally diverse communities. Atlanta's culture primarily reflects a long history of interplay and conflict between the two most populous groups, White people and African Americans.

Atlantans still regularly and happily devour their favorite soul food and Southern regional cuisine, both of which overlap considerably in their celebration of such dishes as hominy grits, cornbread, and fried chicken. Atlantans also enjoy the tastes of Low Country, another variation of intercultural Southern cuisine. Although it is seafood-intensive, one of its signature dishes, hoppin' john, is made with black-eyed peas, rice, and bacon. "Coke" is the generic term used for soft drinks, perhaps because Coca-Cola is literally the hometown beverage: the company was founded in Atlanta during the 1880s.

Some White Atlantans still revere the Confederacy. Until 1997, an Antebellum Jubilee was held at the Confederate monument at nearby Stone Mountain in the last week of March, and Confederate General Robert E. Lee's birthday (January 19, but celebrated in Georgia on the Friday after Thanksgiving) and Confederate Memorial Day (the fourth Monday in April) were official state holidays until 2016. (Both days remain official holidays, but Georgia governor Nathan Deal renamed both as simply "State Holiday" in 2015.) At the same time, the birthday of Atlanta native Martin Luther King Jr. is officially celebrated, not only on the third Monday in January, but with a week-long festival organized by the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

Economy

Despite the global recession of 2008–10, Atlanta's business climate has stayed relatively vibrant. By the 2020s, several Fortune 1000 companies, some of which were also in the Fortune 500, had their headquarters in the Atlanta metropolitan region, including Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines. Local factories assemble cars and aircraft and produce telecommunications hardware, food products, paper, furniture, textiles, chemicals, and steel. Atlanta is also the home of the Cable News Network (CNN), the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), major military installations, and a federal penitentiary.

A popular convention site, Atlanta boasts many sizable hotels. The city is home to several professional sports teams: the Falcons (football), the Braves (baseball), and the Hawks (basketball). Since 1985, the Sports Council has steered dozens of major athletic events to the region, most notably the 1996 Summer Olympic Games and three Super Bowls. The Peach Bowl alone contributes millions to the local economy each year. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the public transit system, connects downtown with Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, one of the world's busiest airports and a major hub for those traveling both within the United States and abroad.

Atlanta's economic future appears to lie in its already flourishing "Industries of the Mind": corporate headquarters, biosciences, logistics and transportation, telecommunications, and computing. These businesses already tap into the research expertise and educated labor force being produced by the city's numerous colleges and universities, including Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), Georgia State University, Oglethorpe University, and the historically black colleges Clark Atlanta University (formerly Clark College and Atlanta University), Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, and Spelman College.

Landmarks

Atlanta's historic neighborhoods are landmarks themselves. The downtown area, revitalized after the 1996 Olympics, is called Five Points, after the star-shaped intersection of Peachtree Street with four other roads. Here one finds the 1889 state capitol building, whose dome is covered in forty-three ounces of pure gold, and Underground Atlanta, a tourist area excavated from beneath a viaduct system after fifty years. Atlanta's downtown area also includes the Georgia Aquarium, home to thousands of animals, such as sea otters, manta rays, and dolphins. Opened in 2005, the aquarium is the largest in the US and one of the largest in the world.

The Little Five Points district, more bohemian than its namesake, was in the early 1900s the business district of adjacent Inman Park, which contains the historically Black colleges. Grant Park, south of downtown, is home to Zoo Atlanta and previously the Cyclorama, constructed in the 1880s, which rotates an enormous circular painting of the Battle of Atlanta around audiences, with lights and sound effects. The Cyclorama was moved to the Atlanta History Center in the early 2020s.

Sweet Auburn, just east of downtown, has been the nexus of Atlanta's African American community for over a century. It was the birthplace and home of civil rights leader the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose life and work are commemorated by the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park, the latter of which includes his boyhood home, his grave site, and the original Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he was baptized and later served as a pastor.

Not far away is Oakland Cemetery, burial site of Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell and many Confederate soldiers, among others. In the city's north end is the Buckhead financial district, also the site of well-preserved mansions and the Atlanta History Center. Piedmont Park harbors the Atlanta Botanical Garden and hosts the annual Dogwood Festival. Further afield is Stone Mountain Park, with ninety-foot-high depictions of Confederate leaders carved into a granite hillside; the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History; the Six Flags over Georgia Amusement Park; and the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.

History

Like their ancient mound-building ancestors, the Muskogee (Creek) people gravitated to southeastern river valleys. A few settled around the thousand-foot-long forested ridge where Atlanta would be founded. In the early nineteenth century, European Americans began seizing the Muskogee's ancestral lands. By 1837, the US Army had forcibly removed more than twenty thousand Muskogee to the Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma, where remnants of the nation survive to this day.

During the 1830s, white settlers began to grow cotton in the Georgia Piedmont, using African slave labor. Only a handful of farmers and slaves lived around Atlanta's future site, which was not close enough to a river to make shipping cotton to large urban markets on the coasts feasible. In 1837, civil engineer Stephen Long drove a stake on the ridge to mark the place where several railroads would converge and end. With the railroads came a modest settlement first called Terminus, then Marthasville, then finally Atlanta.

By 1860, Atlanta boasted ten thousand residents, most of them dependent on the railroads for their livelihood. During the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman and his forces burned the city to the ground because its rail lines were essential to the transport of Confederate Army supplies. The city mounted a quick comeback, and by 1868, the state capital had moved from Milledgeville to Atlanta, and the resurrected city had twice its antebellum population. Realtors established a horse-drawn (later electric) trolley company that afforded ready access to new houses on large wooded lots north of the city. Prosperous whites flocked to these new suburbs, with their extensive garden and tree plantings and urban parks in the famous style of Frederick Law Olmsted.

At this time, the local population was 40 percent African American. The Jim Crow laws segregated Black Americans into physically strenuous, low-paying jobs such as sharecropping and domestic work, but activists such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois helped inspire economic and educational progress. The city's historically Black colleges sprang up during the 1880s. In 1906, white mobs attacked the Black business district, angered by its increasing visibility and success, but the Black community rebuilt.

At the start of the twentieth century, Atlanta, with a population of one hundred thousand, had become a regional and national railway transportation center. The downtown area was already turning into an office center with modern "skyscrapers," department stores, theaters, hotels, and restaurants. Meanwhile, personal automobiles began taking the place of electric trolleys and buses. During the 1930s, the boll weevil and soil depletion and erosion finally dethroned "King Cotton," but Atlanta's economic base had already shifted away from cotton.

After World War I, new "garden suburbs," characterized by bungalows on wooded lots, began encircling the city. Largely shut out of new housing and economic opportunities, African Americans resourcefully created their own wherever possible. Atlanta's first hint of Black political clout came with several bond referendum victories that improved conditions in Black neighborhood schools.

Following World War II, Atlanta's population mushroomed to over half a million people, mostly in the areas outside the older suburbs. The construction of the expressway system, MARTA, and Hartsfield International Airport encouraged this suburban boom. With the decline of the railroads, Hartsfield's economic importance increased. Retail, entertainment, and employment venues, particularly for white residents, shifted away from downtown Atlanta into the burgeoning new suburbs, especially after 1965. Inside the city, African Americans gained further political power and used it to dismantle Jim Crow, especially under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1972, Atlanta elected the city's first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, as well as Andrew Young, the first African American congressman since Reconstruction.

In the 1980s, Hartsfield began to rival Chicago's O'Hare as the world's busiest airport. It made Atlanta more accessible than ever to business travelers, convention goers, and tourists from around the globe. Because of its economic boom and increasing reputation for racial tolerance, Atlanta became known as the "Capital of the New South." Black and white civic boosters worked together to bring the 1996 Olympics to the city. Some Atlantans viewed this feat as a sign that the era of discrimination was long gone.

Environmental sustainability and further racial progress appear to be Atlanta's biggest challenges in the early twenty-first century. For example, as urban neighborhoods gentrify, the return of white suburbanites and loss of affordable housing are arousing concern among African Americans. For the period 2015 to 2017, Atlanta received a failing grade for ozone pollution levels, according to the American Lung Association. Though the city's air had improved slightly in 2022, the city's air quality worsened in 2025. That year, it received a failing grade for ozone pollution and ranked as the third worst metro area in the Southeast. Increased heat and wildfires across the nation caused by climate change were also noted as a factor in Atlanta's poor air quality.

In the 2020s, Atlanta was preparing to host the FIFA World Cup in the summer of 2026.

Trivia

• A popular regional joke: "When you die, you can't go straight to heaven. Your soul has a stopover at the Atlanta airport first."
• The Civil War was short on humor, but at least it had the "Great Locomotive Chase." After Union troops stole a Confederate train engine near Marietta, the Confederates ran another one in reverse to catch it.
• From the Department of Famous Last Words: Stephen Long, the man who staked out the railroad nexus that became Atlanta, skipped town in the belief that it was "good enough for a blacksmith shop, a grocery store, a tavern, and nothing more."

Bibliography

"ACS Demographic and Housing Estimates." US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, ACS 1-Year Estimates Data Profiles, Table DP05, 2024, data.census.gov/table/ACSDP1Y2024.DP05?q=Atlanta+city,+Georgia. Accessed on 25 Nov 2025.

Allen, Frederick. Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City, 1946–1996. Longstreet Press, 1996.

Ambrose, Andy. "Atlanta." New Georgia Encylcopedia, 22 Apr. 2019, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/counties-cities-neighborhoods/atlanta. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019.

Ambrose, Andy. Atlanta: An Illustrated History. Hill Street Press, 2003.

"Climate Change in Atlanta, Georgia." Climate Central, www.climatecentral.org/climate-local/41380. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

"Metro Atlanta Fortune 500 & 1000 Headquarters." Metro Atlanta Chamber, 2025, www.metroatlantachamber.com/resources/most-popular/fortune-500-fortune-1000-in-metro-atlanta. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

"New Report: Atlanta’s Air Quality Worsens; Is Among Worst in Southeast for Ozone Smog and Year-Round Particle Pollution." American Lung Association, 23 Apr. 2025, www.lung.org/media/press-releases/sota-atlanta-2025. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

Pendergrast, Mark. City on the Verge: Atlanta and the Fight for America's Urban Future. Basic Books, 2017.

Rhone, Nedra. "Five Metro Atlanta Counties Earn a Failing Grade for Air Quality." Atlanta Journal Constitution, 24 Apr. 2019, www.ajc.com/news/five-metro-atlanta-counties-earn-failing-grade-for-air-quality/C6Csmoq45khlpJMACq0cKM/. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.

2026 Atlanta FIFA, 2025, atlantafwc26.com. Accessed 25 Nov. 2025.