For this new edition, available in paperback for the first time, A History of Georgia has been revised to bring the work up through the events of the 1980s.
The watershed 1972 ruling Furman v. Georgia reversed the Court's stand on capital punishment, holding that the arbitrary and capricious imposition of the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore unconstitutional.
Examines the persistence and ultimate collapse of Georgia's plantation-oriented colonial society and the emergence of a modern state with greater urbanization, industrialization, and diversification