digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

The aim of this digital map and essay is to make visible the presence of people from all over the globe in Atlanta more than a century ago. Every foreign-born Atlantan listed in the 1896 census has been categorized according to their country or region of nativity; the dots show the location of each immigrant’s residence, as recorded by census takers. The first map is interactive: you can click on each dot to learn about these immigrant Atlantans. You can choose different historical maps, or a modern street map, as the base layer. The essay is organized by region, and a static map of each region’s residents is included in each section. You can limit the visible dots to a single region’s residents on the interactive map as well.

Citation: Davis, Marni. “’Immigrants in Atlanta: 1896″. Atlanta Studies. July 21, 2026. https://doi.org/10.18737/atls20260721

Since the beginning of the daguerreotype, Black women photographers have been historically excluded from history and underrepresented in major art galleries, mainstream media, and archives. Featured here are Black women photographers in Atlanta who ran studios, captured portraits, and helped shape the city’s visual history. This “digital museum” serves as both an educational resource and a public history archive, ensuring that the stories of these Black women photographers are not forgotten but are shared with scholars, the creative world, and future generations.

Newly revised! This map-based digital essay explores the history of Georgia Avenue, which once served as an important commercial thoroughfare in the neighborhoods south of downtown Atlanta and is now the southern edge of Georgia State University’s campus. Using the concept of the city as palimpsest – the idea that transformations of a built environment leave traces of the past – we can rediscover a multiethnic, multiracial neighborhood that was entirely erased by massive urban development projects, and see how Summerhill, and other “stadium neighborhoods” in Atlanta, were so thoroughly transformed over the course of the twentieth century.

Originally Atlanta’s first modern parking garage, Kell Hall began as a 1920s “automobile hotel” and later became Georgia State’s first permanent building, illustrating urban ambition, cost effective development, and adaptive reuse. A testament to the resourceful and inventive spirit of GSU’s early leaders, Kell Hall endured through more than seven decades of growth and innovation as Georgia State evolved from the University System of Georgia’s “Atlanta Extension Center” to a world-class urban research university.

The September 1990 announcement that Atlanta would host the 1996 Olympics surprised and thrilled many Atlantans. The ’96 Summer Games would mark the 100th anniversary of the modern games, and Athens, Greece, home of the modern Olympiad, had also put in a bid. But Atlanta lawyer Billy Payne was determined. Ultimately dubbed by the President of the International Olympic Committee Juan Samaranch as the “most exceptional” Olympics thirty years later, the lasting legacy for Atlanta is still complicated. Was hosting the Games ultimately just an opportunistic business venture, or was it motivated by a real desire to show off “the city too busy to hate”? Between a serial bomber, a charismatic lawyer, and a city searching for its identity, the conclusion is still mixed to this day.

Atlanta, a new city established by the railroads in the 19th century and transformed by the automobile in the 20th century, was built first for the movement of goods and then later for people, not unlike most industrial U.S. cities. As the city managed tremendous growth and the rise of the automobile, city planners and visionaries sought to alleviate traffic and safety concerns at the city’s numerous rail crossings by building a series of viaducts and raised streets, thus creating an “elevated city” in portions of downtown. This idea spread as city planners envisioned a platform city where automobiles, streetcars, and pedestrians could move freely on elevated concrete and steel platforms above the “grimy” and “smoky” congestion-causing railway lines. Today’s Underground Atlanta is a result of such initiatives, namely the twin viaducts project of 1927-1929, which elevated the streets around then Union Station (1871-1930) in the heart of downtown. During this time, one visionary architect, Haralson Bleckley, championed the idea of an extended raised city plaza to cover much downtown, a dream that was never realized. Later in the 1960s, a new university for downtown Atlanta, Georgia State College (now University), developed plans to build a “Plaza Campus” with elevated pedestrian platforms above the noise and inconvenience of city traffic. Other visionary architects followed, envisioning Atlanta as an elevated city of the future. While these plans may have been forward thinking, many were also aligned with, if not partially driven by, urban renewal efforts of city leaders. More recently, ambitious urban revitalization projects such as Centennial Yards, which will transform Atlanta’s railroad Gulch, and The Stitch, with plans to cover the multi-lane interstate Connector from Downtown to Midtown, seek to connect people and communities on elevated plazas and platforms above Atlanta’s “least attractive” (The Gulch) and most congested (Downtown Connector) areas — or as Bleckley put it in 1915 in describing Atlanta’s railway tracks and yards, “the grimy chasm that scars Atlanta’s beauty.”

Digital tour of the rise and fall of the bawdy brothels that lined Downtown Atlanta’s Collins Street from the late 1800s to the early 1900s—showcasing tantalizing tidbits from newspapers, census records, city directories, property records, maps, and more from Georgia State University Library’s digital resources. Walk the streets (well, not like that!) and transport your imagination back to those bygone days when sin and Southern hospitality went hand in hand. Launched Spring 2022.

This online exhibit contains original materials donated to GSU Library’s Special Collections & Archives. These items are comprised of correspondence, legal documents, notes and research materials, photographs, and artifacts belonging to the late Civil Rights leader Lonnie King, Jr. They chronicle his life, career and involvement with the Atlanta Student Movement, NAACP, Morehouse College, and Georgia State University.

Mapping Atlanta’s Jim Crow Era Women’s Basketball Community. During the era of legalized segregation, Black Atlantans created their own economic, educational, and recreational institutions. In Black schools, community centers, and entertainment venues, Black women played basketball. Sarah Almeta Hill captained a title-winning basketball team while teaching full-time. Then, she became Atlanta’s most successful coach. She won titles, trophies, and temporary stardom. Reporters even described her as a tennis queen and basketball veteran. Despite the five consecutive city titles, two back-to-back state championships, and consistent press during her playing days, Hill barely shows up in an internet search. Neither do the women she competed with in Atlanta’s Jim Crow Era Black women’s basketball community. Those women played basketball and represented their schools, women’s clubs, and sometimes their employers. Sometimes they were models of respectability, sometimes they entertained, and sometimes they simply played because they were competitors. There are traces of their lives and careers made visible through digging through archival documents, yearbooks, and news reports. Most information is not easily accessible, but understanding their participation in basketball is an important part of sports history.

Georgia State University students map Atlanta’s past. This website is produced by Dr. Marni Davis and her students at the downtown Atlanta campus of Georgia State University. GSU has been part of downtown Atlanta since 1913, when it was founded to offer evening courses in business and commerce. As GSU grew, so did its presence in the city. Today, GSU’s downtown campus includes historic buildings and neighborhoods, brand new buildings and public space, urban renewal project areas, and an Olympic stadium. But cities are always built on top of history. What was here before GSU’s campus as we know it? If the past is invisible to us at street level, how can we make it visible?

Within Georgia State University Library’s digital collections can be found a series of approximately 100 photographs depicting downtown Atlanta streets in 1927, focusing mainly on the area just south of GSU’s present-day downtown campus. These images were scanned from glass plate negatives owned by the Special Collections of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, which were loaned to GSU Library so that they could be digitized and shared with a wider audience. Of particular interest are images of city streets and storefronts at street level before many were covered over to make way for the “twin viaducts” project of 1927-1929, the city project that elevated the street levels of Central Avenue and Pryor Street (the viaducts) running north to south as well as Alabama and Wall Streets (the laterals) running east to west. This project quite literally entombed the original ground-level streets and storefronts below to become what we now know as Underground Atlanta. Thanks to this unique collection of images, we can return to downtown Atlanta before the construction of these viaducts and elevated streets.

Archived by the Wayback Machine.

Traces the history of the historic rail corridor that is currently under redevelopment as the Atlanta BeltLine. This site showcases items from repositories around the city of Atlanta and the United States, gathered and posted by students in HIST 8885, Theory and Practice of Digital History, a course in the Heritage Preservation Program at Georgia State University. Students have also created narrative exhibits that interrogate themes relevant to the history of the Rail Corridor including communities, neighborhoods, educational institutions, businesses, and the changing uses of the natural and built environment. Students have made a concerted effort to obtain permission for the use of items on this site. Rights and licenses are posted on the individual item pages.  If you have any questions or need to request that an item be taken down, please contact the project coordinator, Adina Langer, at alanger at gsu.edu.