Atlanta

William Tecumseh Sherman's army occupied Atlanta in September 1864, held it for two months as a military base, then burned its warehouses, rail yards, and industrial infrastructure before marching to the sea. What Sherman left behind was approximately one-third of Atlanta's buildings and the end of the Confederacy's most critical rail hub. What Atlantans rebuilt in the decades that followed became one of the most deliberate acts of urban self-invention in American history — a city that turned its own destruction into a founding mythology.

Atlanta positioned itself as the capital of the "New South" — a vision of a modernized, industrialized region competitive with the North, which quietly preserved the racial hierarchy of the old one behind a progressive facade. The city's boosters were gifted at attracting Northern investment and national institutions. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta, educated at Morehouse College, and is buried there. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was headquartered there. The city Sherman burned became the organizational center of the movement that finished what the Civil War left unresolved.

Atlanta's 1996 Summer Olympics were the city's most ambitious assertion of its own arrival — and produced one of the era's most significant domestic terrorist incidents, when Eric Rudolph's bombing of Centennial Olympic Park killed two people and wounded more than a hundred. The FBI's premature public focus on security guard Richard Jewell — who had actually discovered the bomb — became a cautionary case study in the dangers of trial by media and investigative confirmation bias.

Metropolitan Atlanta today is a region of nearly 6.3 million people, home to more Fortune 500 headquarters than any American city outside New York, and one of the fastest-growing Black middle-class populations in the country. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport consistently ranks as the world's busiest by passenger traffic. The city's trajectory from Confederate rail hub to Sun Belt economic engine mirrors almost exactly the arc of the American South itself.