Stan’s guest this week is DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond, who talks about his new book, James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey From Slave Trader to Abolitionist, published by the University of Georgia Press. Michael argues that Oglethorpe has never gotten credit for his pathbreaking efforts to keep slavery out of the Georgia colony and his subsequent impact on the emerging abolitionist movement in England.
Stan’s guest this week is Jerry Grillo, author of Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize. Mize was born in Demorest, Georgia, and played 15 seasons in Major League Baseball and won 5 World Series.
How do we hold institutions accountable for the sins of the past? In this podcast, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Blight of Yale University talks with Stan about his latest book, Yale and Slavery: A History, and how he and a team of researchers uncovered Yale’s historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, abolition, and Jim Crow—and the important role that slavery played in the creation of one of America’s most renowned institutions of higher learning.
This week Stan discusses a new book on an old legend—Bigfoot—and the hope that springs eternal with the return of the Beloved Braves and Major League Baseball.
Stan’s guest this week is Clayton Trutor, talking about his recent book Loserville, the winner of the Georgia Historical Society’s 2023 Bell Award for the best book in Georgia history published in 2022. Clayton discusses how Atlanta’s quest for professional sports franchises—the Braves, Falcons, Hawks, and Flames—re-shaped Atlanta and Georgia in the second half of the 20th century.
