Tag: history

It’s more than fitting that South Africa will play a group stage match in Atlanta during the 2026 World Cup, as a legendary soccer player serves as a connection between our city and the Republic, even if many Atlantans today might not recognize his name.

When the Atlanta Chiefs began playing in Atlanta in the late 1960s, it wasn't typical to scout players from Africa or keep any statistics other than the final score. Then the Chiefs changed things.

In honor of America’s 250th birthday this year, the National Archives has created a traveling exhibition of some of the nation’s most significant founding documents. The Freedom Plane National Tour: Documents That Forged a Nation makes its first stop on an eight-city tour beginning this weekend at the Atlanta History Center.

In the early part of the last century, at Christmastime, the Atlanta Journal customarily encouraged children of its readers to write Santa Claus short letters and entrust the newspaper with their safe delivery to the North Pole. No suspicions were raised, apparently, when the Journal printed many of those letters a few days before the holiday. And so it came to pass that the endearing, sometimes humorous wish lists of almost 300 kids filled two full pages in the edition published on December 23, 1908. In the middle of all that gray type, hidden in plain sight and forgotten for well over a century, was one that’s historically noteworthy.

Less than seven years after the first airplane took flight, aviation arrived in Atlanta on the same site as today’s Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In 1925, the company that would eventually become Delta Air Lines formed, and that same year, the City of Atlanta leased an early airfield south of the city for its first municipal airport. We have partnered with the Atlanta History Center for this century-long timeline of Hartsfield-Jackson and Delta Air Lines.

Titanic artifacts are brought to the surface, cleaned off, and delivered to an anonymous storage facility in northern Atlanta whose exact address is kept secret. They are some of thousands of artifacts salvaged from the remains of the RMS Titanic.

As Democrats attempt to flip the state for a second presidential election, many don’t know that the Democratic Party once dominated politics in Georgia, though in a very different form. For most of the 20th century, much of the South embraced the party, whose ideological identity—like that of its foil, the Republicans—was forged by the deepest conflicts in American history. It was progressive Republicans who pushed for an end to slavery, while Democrats espoused a conservative commitment to the status quo. But over the last 100 years, the nation’s two major political parties have effectively swapped sides. Here’s how it happened.

Rachel Bomeli stood on the roof of the Fox Theatre and knew something was off. Renovations for the “Onion Dome” that crowns the building were almost underway, and Bomeli, the vice president of facility operations, compared the current dome to a photograph of the original. Somewhere in the Fox’s 95-year history, someone had taken creative liberties.

It was 50 years ago this month—April 8, 1974—that Henry Aaron hit his 715th career home run off pitcher Al Downing in Atlanta, breaking Ruth’s 39-year record. When he finally reached that summit, it seemed less a cause for celebration for Aaron than reason for a long sigh of relief: The chase was finally over.

It may be hard to imagine today, when gridlock traffic is synonymous with Atlanta, but riding public transit was once the norm. Here, a brief look at the city's former streetcar system and why Atlanta's public transit had such a decline.