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Georgia ( JOR-jə) is a state in the Southeastern, South Atlantic, and Deep South regions of the United States. It borders Tennessee to the northwest, North Carolina and South Carolina to the northeast, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Florida to the south, and Alabama to the west. Of the 50 U.S. states, Georgia is the 24th-largest by area and eighth-most populous. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, its 2025 estimated population was 11,302,748. Atlanta, a global city, is both the state's capital and its largest city. The Atlanta metropolitan area, with a population greater than 6.3 million people in 2023, is the eighth most populous metropolitan area in the United States and contains about 57% of Georgia's entire population. Other major metropolitan areas in the state include Augusta, Savannah, Columbus, and Macon.
The Province of Georgia was established in 1732, with its first settlement occurring in 1733 when Savannah was founded. By 1752, Georgia had transitioned into a British royal colony, making it the last and southernmost of the original Thirteen Colonies. On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution. Between 1802 and 1804, a portion of western Georgia was carved out to create the Mississippi Territory, which eventually became the U.S. states of Alabama and Mississippi. Georgia declared its secession from the Union on January 19, 1861, joining the ranks of the original seven Confederate States. After the Civil War, it was the last state to be readmitted to the Union on July 15, 1870.
In the late 19th century, during the post-Reconstruction period, Georgia's economy underwent significant changes, driven by a coalition of influential politicians, business leaders, and journalists, notably Henry W. Grady, who promoted the "New South" ideology focused on reconciliation and industrialization. In the mid-20th century, several notable figures from Georgia, including Martin Luther King Jr., emerged as key leaders in the civil rights movement. Since 1945, Georgia has experienced significant population and economic expansion, aligning with the larger Sun Belt trend.
Georgia is defined by a diversity of landscapes, flora, and fauna, such as the Blue Ridge Mountains (part of the broader Appalachian Mountain range) and the Piedmont plateau. Except for some elevated areas in the Blue Ridge, Georgia predominantly experiences a humid subtropical climate.
Before settlement by European colonists, Georgia was governed by mound building polities such as Ocute and Coosa.
On February 12, 1733, a year after Georgia was established as a British colony, the Province of Georgia was established in Savannah by British General James Oglethorpe. It was administered by the Trustees for the Establishment of the Colony of Georgia in America under a charter issued by (and named for) King George II. The Trustees implemented an elaborate plan for the colony's settlement, known as the Oglethorpe Plan, which envisioned an agrarian society of yeoman farmers and prohibited slavery. The colony was invaded by the Spanish in 1742, during the War of Jenkins' Ear. In 1752, after the government failed to renew subsidies that had helped support the colony, the Trustees turned over control to the crown. Georgia became a crown colony, with a governor appointed by the king of Great Britain.
The Province of Georgia was one of the Thirteen Colonies that revolted against British rule in the American Revolution. Its delegates to the Second Continental Congress, which convened in present-day Independence Hall in Philadelphia, joined other delegates in unanimously approving the Declaration of Independence, which declared the Thirteen Colonies free and independent from British colonial rule.
Georgia's first constitution was ratified in February 1777. Georgia was the 10th state to ratify the Articles of Confederation on July 24, 1778, and was the 4th state to ratify the United States Constitution on January 2, 1788.
After the Creek War (1813–1814), General Andrew Jackson forced the Muscogee (Creek) tribes to surrender land to Georgia, including in the Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814), surrendering 21 million acres in what is now southern Georgia and central Alabama, and the Treaty of Indian Springs (1825). In 1829, gold was discovered in the North Georgia mountains leading to the Georgia Gold Rush and establishment of a federal mint in Dahlonega, which continued in operation until 1861. The resulting influx of American settlers put pressure on the federal U.S. government to take land from the Cherokee Nation. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act, sending many eastern Indian nations to reservations in present-day Oklahoma, including all of Georgia's tribes. President Jackson and the state of Georgia ignored the Supreme Court's ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that U.S. states were not permitted to redraw Indian boundaries. In 1838, his successor, Martin Van Buren, dispatched federal troops to gather the tribes and deport them west of the Mississippi. This forced relocation, known as the Trail of Tears, led to the death of more than four thousand Cherokees.
In early 1861, as the American Civil War commenced, Georgia chose to leave the Union to join the Confederacy. Support for secession from the Union enjoyed a majority among the state's delegates, which grew during successive votes, and the state ultimately became one of several major military theaters during the Civil War.
Major battles took place at Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta. In December 1864, a large swath of the state from Atlanta to Savannah, was destroyed during General William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea, during which 18,253 Georgian soldiers were killed, representing roughly one of every five then in service of the Confederacy. One of the most notorious Civil War sites in the state was Andersonville Prison, where nearly 13,000 Union prisoners of war died from disease, malnutrition, and overcrowding. Following the war, the camp's commander Henry Wirz was sentenced to death for war crimes and hanged, making him the highest-ranking Confederate official to be executed.
Georgia did not re-enter the Union until July 15, 1870, as the last of the former Confederate states to be re-admitted. Federal troops would continue to be stationed in the state until the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. White Democrats, having regained power in the state legislature, passed a poll tax in that year which disenfranchised many poor black (and some white) people, preventing them from registering. In 1908, the state established a white primary; with the only competitive contests within the Democratic Party, it was another way to exclude black people from politics. They constituted 46.7% of the state's population in 1900, but the proportion of Georgia's population that was African American dropped thereafter to 28%, primarily due to tens of thousands leaving the state during the Great Migration.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative's 2015 report on lynching in the United States (1877–1950), Georgia had 531 deaths, the second-highest total of these extralegal executions of any state in the South. The overwhelming number of victims were black and male. Many of the killings were committed by the white supremacist hate group the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), whose second iteration was formed at Georgia's Stone Mountain by William Joseph Simmons on November 25, 1915. The Klan's revival was spurned in part by the 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan and the lynching two years later of her convicted killer, Jewish pencil factory supervisor and B'nai B'rith Atlanta chapter president Leo Frank. The affair led to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, which successfully lobbied for Frank to be posthumously pardoned in 1986. Political disfranchisement persisted through the mid-1960s, until after Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Martin Luther King Jr., an Atlanta-born Baptist minister who was part of the educated middle class that had developed in the city's African-American community, emerged as a national leader in the civil rights movement in the 1950s. King joined with others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta in 1957 to provide political leadership for the civil rights movement across the South. In 1956, riots occurred at the Sugar Bowl in Atlanta following a clash between Georgia Tech's president Blake R. Van Leer and Governor Marvin Griffin.
On February 5, 1958, during a training mission flown by a B-47, a Mark 15 nuclear bomb, also known as the Tybee Bomb, was lost off the coast of Tybee Island near Savannah. The bomb was thought by the Department of Energy to lie buried in silt at the bottom of Wassaw Sound.
By the 1960s, the proportion of African Americans in Georgia had declined to 28% of the state's population, after waves of migration to the North and some immigration by whites. With their voting power diminished, it took some years for African Americans to win a state-wide office. Julian Bond, a civil rights leader, was elected to the Georgia's House of Representatives in 1965, and served multiple terms there and subsequently in Georgia's State Senate.
Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr. testified before Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act, and Governor Carl Sanders worked with the Kennedy administration charged with ensuring the state's compliance. Ralph McGill, editor and syndicated columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, wrote supportively of civil rights movement. In 1970, Jimmy Carter, who was recently elected the state's governor, declared in his inaugural address that the era of racial segregation had ended. In 1972, Georgians elected Andrew Young to Congress as the first African American Congressman since the Reconstruction era.
In 1910, a secret meeting was held on Jekyll Island, off Georgia's Atlantic coast, to plan for the creation of an American central banking system. The decisions made at the meeting led toward the passing of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
In 1980, construction was completed on an expansion of what is now named Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). The busiest and most efficient airport in the world, it accommodates more than a hundred million passengers annually. Employing more than 60,000 people, the airport became a major engine for economic growth. With the advantages of cheap real estate, low taxes, right-to-work laws and a regulatory environment limiting government interference, the Atlanta metropolitan area became a national center of finance, insurance, technology, manufacturing, real estate, logistics, and transportation companies, as well as the film, convention, and trade show businesses. As a testament to the city's growing international profile, in 1990 the International Olympic Committee selected Atlanta as the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics. Taking advantage of Atlanta's status as a transportation hub, in 1991, UPS established its headquarters in the suburb of Sandy Springs. In 1992, construction finished on Bank of America Plaza, the tallest building in the U.S. outside of New York City or Chicago.
In 2024, it was announced that Atlanta would host multiple games during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which further substantiated the economic investment and growth in the city and state.
Beginning from the Atlantic Ocean, the state's eastern border with South Carolina runs up the Savannah River, northwest to its origin at the confluence of the Tugaloo and Seneca Rivers. It then continues up the Tugaloo (originally Tugalo) and into the Chattooga River, its most significant tributary. These bounds were decided in the 1797 Treaty of Beaufort, and tested in the U.S. Supreme Court in the two Georgia v. South Carolina cases in 1923 and 1989.
The border then takes a sharp turn around the tip of Rabun County, at latitude 35°N, though from this point it diverges slightly south (due to inaccuracies in the original survey, conducted in 1818). This northern border was originally the Georgia and North Carolina border all the way to the Mississippi River, until Tennessee was divided from North Carolina, and the Yazoo companies induced the legislature of Georgia to pass an act, approved by the governor in 1795, to sell the greater part of Georgia's territory presently comprising Alabama and Mississippi.
The state's western border runs in a straight line south-southeastward from a point southwest of Chattanooga, to meet the Chattahoochee River near West Point. It continues downriver to the point where it joins the Flint River (the confluence of the two forming Florida's Apalachicola River); the southern border goes almost due east and very slightly south, in a straight line to the St. Mary's River, which then forms the remainder of the boundary back to the ocean.
The water boundaries are still set to be the original thalweg of the rivers. Since then, several have been inundated by lakes created by dams, including the Apalachicola/Chattahoochee/Flint point now under Lake Seminole.
An 1818 survey erroneously placed Georgia's border with Tennessee one mile (1.6 km) south of the intended location of the 35th parallel north. State legislators still dispute this placement, as correction of this inaccuracy would allow Georgia access to water from the Tennessee River.
Georgia consists of five principal physiographic regions: The Cumberland Plateau, Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, Blue Ridge Mountains, Piedmont, and the Atlantic coastal plain. Each region has its own distinctive characteristics. For instance, the region, which lies in the northwest corner of the state, includes limestone, sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary rocks, which have yielded construction-grade limestone, barite, ocher, and small amounts of coal.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Georgia (U.S. state)”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.