The Journal of the Earl of Egmont reveals private historical records kept by John Perceval, the first Earl of Egmont and secretary for the Common Council, a council appointed by the Charter of the colony of Georgia. A close friend of James Edward Oglethorpe, Egmont was instrumental in various colonial projects, including obtaining money for the new Carolina charter, serving as the first president of the Trustees, and often serving as the chairman of the Common Council. His careful records and plentiful writing found here offer a historical perspective on Georgia's early days.

The Journal of the Earl of Egmont reveals private historical records kept by John Perceval, the first Earl of Egmont and secretary for the Common Council, a council appointed by the Charter of the colony of Georgia. A close friend of James Edward Oglethorpe, Egmont was instrumental in various colonial projects, including obtaining money for the new Carolina charter, serving as the first president of the Trustees, and often serving as the chairman of the Common Council. His careful records and plentiful writing found here offer a historical perspective on Georgia's early days. The Georgia Open History Library has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this collection, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

These essays look at southern social customs within a single city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the volume focuses on paternalism between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, elites and the masses, and industrialists and workers. How Augusta's millworkers, homemakers, and others resisted, exploited, or endured the constraints of paternalism reveals the complex interplay between race, class, and gender. One essay looks at the subordinating effects of paternalism on women in the Old South-slave, free black, and white-and the coping strategies available to each group. Another focuses on the Knights of Labor union in Augusta. With their trappings of chivalry, the Knights are viewed as a response by Augusta's white male millworkers to the emasculating "maternalism" to which they were subjected by their own wives and daughters and those of mill owners and managers. Millworkers are also the topic of a study of mission work in their communities, a study that gauges the extent to which religious outreach by elites was a means of social control rather than an outpouring of genuine concern for worker welfare. Other essays discuss Augusta's "aristocracy of color," who had to endure the same effronteries of segregation as the city's poorest blacks; the role of interracial cooperation in the founding of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church as a denomination, and of Augusta's historic Trinity CME Church; and William Jefferson White, an African American minister, newspaper editor, and founder of Morehouse College. The varied and creative responses to paternalism discussed here open new ways to view relationships based on power and negotiated between men and women, blacks and whites, and the prosperous and the poor.

This collection of essays grew out of a symposium commemorating the 250th anniversary of the founding of Georgia. The contributors are authorities in their respective fields and their efforts represent not only the fruits of long careers but also the observations and insights of some of the most promising young scholars. "Forty Years of Diversity" sheds new light on the social, political, religious, and ethnic diversity of colonial Georgia.