Arts & Culture

Featured – Historic Harlots of Old Atlanta
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 […]

Featured – Rap Map
Celebrating 50 years of hip-hop! The Rap Map visualizes metro Atlanta’s influence on hip-hop and hip-hop’s influence on the region over the last three decades. The Rap Map highlights the disconnect between the rapid pace of development in the city and its negligible impact on how hip hop music engages with the city’s geography. It […]

Featured – The Phoenix Project: Resurrecting the MARTA Archaeological Collection and Atlanta’s Past
During the 1970s, Georgia State University archaeologists conducted systematic excavations associated with the construction of the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) rail lines. This project recovered the material remains of Atlanta’s past, and these materials represent the single most comprehensive archaeological collection of Atlanta’s history. In addition, the excavations themselves are among the pioneering […]

Streetscape Palimpsest: A History of Georgia Avenue
Digital project that investigates 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 GSU’s campus. This interactive historical narrative rediscovers a neighborhood that was entirely replaced by urban renewal projects, and explains why Summerhill, and other “stadium […]

Atlanta Sit-Ins, 1961-1964
Beginning in 1960, the Atlanta sit-in movement took over the downtown area of the city. Follow this tour to see where student activists conducted their peaceful protests and sat down to stand up for what they believed in. You’ll learn about major players and events of the movement while visiting the actual sites where they […]

Atlanta-Fulton Public Library Collection: Maps
This digital collection contains digitized versions of items that are owned by the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library. Currently, the collection contains historical maps, dating from the 1850s to the 1980s, of Atlanta and the surrounding area. The maps were created by a variety of entities and for various purposes. More content is expected to be added […]

Atlanta Water Walk
How water has shaped the city. Video tour with urban designer and author Hannah Palmer. Palmer’s writing explores the intersection of Southern stories and urban landscapes, and has appeared on CNN.com, Art Papers, Creative Loafing, and in masterplans for urban design projects around the world. Related Content Palmer, Hannah. “The scent of water: Searching for […]

ATLMaps
The ATLMaps platform, a collaboration between Georgia State University and Emory University, combines archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user contributed multimedia location pinpoints to promote investigation into any number of issues about Atlanta. While currently focused on one city to demonstrate the power of stacking thousands of layers of information on one place, this […]

Krog Codex: Archive of Krog Street Tunnel
A Community Interactive Digital Archive. Krog Street Tunnel is one of Atlanta’s premier destinations for street art, political communication, and a community bulletin board. Since the late 1960s, artists have added and subtracted new paintings, messages, and designs to its walls, effectively creating a rapidly changing archive of local cultural concerns. The tunnel and the […]

Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern
Aims to both preserve this unintentional archive as it was before Manuel’s Tavern underwent renovations in 2015 and provide a platform through which one might learn more about the individual items in this archive and even contribute to the knowledge about them. This project is the result of a collaboration via the Atlanta Studies Network, […]

A Race Against Time: Saving Atlanta’s Photographic History
Online exhibit feature photographs and negatives from Georgia State University’s Special Collections and Archives, consisting of images from six photographic collecting areas: Lane Brothers Commercial Photographers, Tracy W. O’Neal, Ernest G. Welch, Tom Coffin, David Lennox, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archives. These visual treasures document daily life in Atlanta and the region during the […]

Downtown Folk Tour
Recorded stories from Dr. John Burrison, Folklorist and Professor of English at Georgia State University, who has collected stories of folk music, pottery, legends, medicine, and religious practices in Atlanta. This walking tour will guide you through folk sites downtown, specifically around locations which now make up today’s GSU campus. This project was developed under […]