As a schoolboy in Hart County, Jim Cobb learned that Georgia was settled by colonists who had been released from debtors' prisons in England.
As a historian at the University of Georgia, he eagerly shoots down that familiar story. When students occasionally suggest that Georgians are descended from convicts, he takes umbrage and jokes that he might have to shoot them or steal their wallets.
Cobb sets the record straight in "Georgia Odyssey" (University of Georgia Press), a new edition of a brief, entertaining history first published in 1997. The truth about Georgia's founding? While James Oglethorpe conceived the colony as a refuge for debtors, British authorities revised the plan to target the "deserving poor," who would not have to be sprung from jail.
Among the other myths Cobb addresses:
> Georgia crackers. No other state can claim a proprietary slur. Cobb points out that "cracker" didn't originally refer to backwoods Georgians known for cracking their corn. The term dates from Elizabethan England —- long before Georgia was founded —- and has come to denote rednecks from all over.
> Our most important war. Not the Civil War. Cobb argues that it's World War II, which brought massive federal spending to the state, speeded the rural-to-city migration and planted the seeds for the civil rights revolution. It was the watershed event in transforming Georgia from a backward state to the forward-leaning capital of the New South.
> The Peach State. Georgia hardly deserves the nickname. Peaches originated in China. While Georgia pioneered their cultivation in the United States, Cobb says, it has never been the top peach-producing state. California and South Carolina now grow far more peaches than Georgia.
> Our top author. With more than 30 million copies of "Gone With the Wind" sold, you might assume that Margaret Mitchell is the best-selling author in Georgia history. Not so. Erskine Caldwell, the Coweta County-born author of "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre," sold twice as many books.
> The weather. After he founded Savannah, Oglethorpe described Georgia's climate as "always serene, pleasant, and temperate; never subject to excessive heat or cold, nor to sudden changes; the winter is regular and short, and the summer cool'd with refreshing breezes." That one, Cobb says, might be more than a myth.
NONFICTION
"Georgia Odyssey" by Jim Cobb. University of Georgia Press. 160 pages. $14.95.
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