Author Talks
Come discover the stories behind Georgia’s colonial and Revolutionary past.
Throughout the year, we will present a series of four lectures in partnership with leading historians and scholars who have written groundbreaking works on colonial and Revolutionary Georgia. These special events will take place at Rhodes Hall, our headquarters in Atlanta, and Hay House, our historic property in Macon.
Austin Dabney and Black Georgians in the Revolutionary War
Noted author and scholar Bob Davis discusses the role of Austin Dabney and other remarkable African Americans during the Revolutionary War in this Zoom program, originally recorded on February 12, 2026.
Black Georgians, like their state, played an important role in the American Revolution. By their choices, they extended the ideals of liberty to all people everywhere. They were found fighting and even dying in both armies, and Black Haitian soldiers served in Georgia, where some remained after the war. George Liele, the first Black Baptist minister, took his ministry to Jamaica, and his followers would help end slavery throughout the British Empire. His disciple David George led resistance to British policy in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
The story of Austin Dabney is one of the most remarkable and controversial in American history. An African American Georgia teenager, he did not join the British in search of freedom from slavery. Dabney fought on the side of the Patriots in some of the most desperate fighting of the American Revolution. Seriously wounded in a battle, he might have been left for dead.
Dabney survived because a white fellow soldier rescued him and took him home to be nursed back to health by his family. Although crippled for life, he survived the wounds and would come to live with the family until he died in 1830. His last guardian, William Harris, the nephew of David H. Thurmond, who rescued him from the battlefield, would name a son Austin Dabney Harris.
Austin Dabney was the first person granted freedom from slavery by a government for his sacrifices in the American Revolution. He was the first to receive a pension and the only person of his race to do so for almost the first 50 years of the United States.
Paul M. Pressly
Author of “A Southern Underground Railroad: Black Georgians and the Promise of Spanish Florida and Indian Country”
Thursday, April 9, 2026
6 p.m.
Hay House
934 Georgia Avenue
Macon, GA 31201
Paul Pressly, Director Emeritus of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance, is both an educator and historian who led the Savannah Country Day School for over two decades and chaired national boards shaping educational policy, including the College Board’s SAT Committee. As a historian, he published On the Rim of the Caribbean and A Southern Underground Railroad with the University of Georgia Press and edited African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry and Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture. Holding degrees from Princeton, Harvard, and Oxford, Pressly’s defining moment came with his discovery of the richness and diversity of Georgia’s barrier islands, inspiring his lifelong commitment to conserving not only their natural beauty but also the human history embedded in their landscapes.
About the Book
Despite its apparent isolation as an older region of the country, the Southeast provided a vital connecting link between the Black self-emancipation that occurred during the American Revolution and the growth of the Underground Railroad in the final years of the antebellum period. From the beginning of the revolutionary war to the eve of the First Seminole War in 1817, hundreds and eventually several thousand Africans and African Americans in Georgia, and to a lesser extent South Carolina, crossed the borders and boundaries that separated the Lowcountry from the British and Spanish in coastal Florida and from the Seminole and Creek people in the vast interior of the Southeast. Even in times of peace, there remained a steady flow of individuals moving south and southwest, reflecting the aspirations of a captive people.
A Southern Underground Railroad constitutes a powerful counter-narrative in American history, a tale of how enslaved men and women found freedom and human dignity not in Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” but outside the expanding boundaries of the United States. It is a potent reminder of the strength of Black resistance in the post-revolutionary South and the ability of this community to influence the balance of power in a contested region. Paul M. Pressly’s research shows that their movement across borders was an integral part of the sustained struggle for dominance in the Southeast not only among the Great Powers but also among the many different racial, ethnic, and religious groups that inhabited the region and contended for control.
Event ticket: $10 for members. $15 for non-members. Ticket includes beer and wine. Spaces are limited.
Michael L. Thurmond
Author of “James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist”
Thursday, June 18, 2026
6 p.m.
Rhodes Hall
1516 Peachtree Street, NW
Atlanta, GA 30309
Michael L. Thurmond was the chief executive officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, from 2017 to 2024. He was a finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2025 for his book James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia. His other books are Freedom: Georgia’s Antislavery Heritage, 1733–1865, and A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History. Thurmond previously served in the Georgia legislature, as director of Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, Georgia labor commissioner, and as superintendent of DeKalb schools. In 1997, Thurmond became a distinguished lecturer at the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government. He lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
About the Book
Founded by James Oglethorpe on February 12, 1733, the Georgia colony was envisioned as a unique social welfare experiment. Administered by twenty-one original trustees, the Georgia Plan offered England’s “worthy poor” and persecuted Christians an opportunity to achieve financial security in the New World by exporting goods produced on small farms. Most significantly, Oglethorpe and his fellow Trustees were convinced that economic vitality could not be achieved through the exploitation of enslaved Black laborers.
Due primarily to Oglethorpe’s strident advocacy, Georgia was the only British American colony to prohibit chattel slavery prior to the American Revolutionary War. His outspoken opposition to the transatlantic slave trade distinguished Oglethorpe from British colonial America’s more celebrated founding fathers.
James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia uncovers how Oglethorpe’s philosophical and moral evolution from slave trader to abolitionist was propelled by his intellectual relationships with two formerly enslaved Black men. Oglethorpe’s unique “friendships” with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and Olaudah Equiano, two of eighteenth-century England’s most influential Black men, are little-known examples of interracial antislavery activism that breathed life into the formal abolitionist movement.
Utilizing more than two decades of meticulous research, fresh historical analysis, and compelling storytelling, Thurmond rewrites the prehistory of abolitionism and adds an important new chapter to Georgia’s origin story.
Event ticket: $10 for members. $15 for non-members. Ticket includes beer and wine. Spaces are limited.
W. Wright Mitchell
Author of “Georgia’s First Elected Governor: John Adam Treutlen and the American Revolution”
Thursday, September 10, 2026
6 p.m.
Rhodes Hall
1516 Peachtree Street, NW
Atlanta, GA 30309
W. Wright Mitchell, President and CEO of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, is an Atlanta native and prominent advocate for safeguarding Georgia’s historic places, with over two decades of leadership in preservation. A former civil litigator, he founded the Buckhead Heritage Society and guided it through a decade of impactful projects, while also contributing numerous articles on Atlanta history to newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. His research centers on colonial Georgia, the Revolutionary War, and the state’s early political development, culminating in his biography of John Adam Treutlen, Georgia’s first elected governor. A graduate of The Lovett School, the University of South Carolina, and Emory University School of Law, Mitchell has served on multiple cultural and preservation boards, including the Atlanta Preservation Center, the Georgia Governor’s Mansion Executive Fine Arts Committee, and the City of Atlanta Sesquicentennial Civil War Commission.
About the Book
John Adam Treutlen arrived in colonial Georgia as a German immigrant, shaped by migration, indenture, and the strict teachings of Protestantism. Against long odds, he rose into Georgia’s political leadership at the moment the colony was pulled into revolution. Fluent in English and rooted in the local community of Ebenezer, Treutlen became a rare bridge between immigrant settlers and the English political elite that governed the colony.Â
As a legislator and later as governor under Georgia’s first revolutionary constitution, Treutlen helped guide the state through war and internal division. His leadership exposed the fragility of Georgia’s early institutions and the difficult balance between resistance, order, and survival in America’s southernmost and last colony. Like many of Georgia’s revolutionary leaders, Treutlen also benefited financially from slavery, a contradiction that complicates the story of liberty in the state’s founding.Â
Driven from Georgia and ultimately murdered by Loyalists, Treutlen’s life reveals the conflict as a civil war as much as a struggle for independence. Drawing on original research, this biography restores a forgotten founder to history and offers a vivid portrait of Georgia’s founding and revolutionary origins.Â
Event ticket: $10 for members. $15 for non-members. Ticket includes beer and wine. Spaces are limited.
Georgia’s First Elected Governor will be available for purchase at the event. All proceeds will benefit The Georgia Trust.