University of Georgia Press Launches the Georgia Open History Library

The University of Georgia Press is pleased to announce the launch of the Georgia Open History Library on Oct. 15, 2021. The Georgia Open History Library (GOHL) is an open-access library of nearly fifty digital editions of single-authored scholarly titles and two multivolume series, as well as primary documents going back to the founding of Georgia as a colony up to statehood and beyond.

GOHL includes studies of Adams and Jefferson; the American Revolution in Georgia; the Creek Nation; the papers of Revolutionary War general Lachlan McIntosh and the colony’s visionary founder James Edward Oglethorpe; and records of the German-speaking Protestant Salzburger settlement. The titles also focus on how Georgia navigated its relationship with Indigenous peoples, other colonies, international diplomacy, as well as its place in a new nation.

Selected by a statewide advisory board of Georgia historians, the volumes in the GOHL constitute the most fulsome portrait of early Georgia and its inhabitants—European, Indigenous, and diasporic African—available from primary sources. Of particular importance are the colonial records of the state of Georgia and what are widely regarded as the essential supplements to those records: the journals and/or letters of the Earl of Egmont, Peter Gordon, and Henry Newton, as well as the two publications of General James Edward Oglethorpe’s own writings. The Press commissioned new forewords written by contemporary historians that add important current scholarly context to each volume.

“We are thrilled to reintroduce the titles in the Georgia Open History Library to the world via these enhanced digital editions,” said UGA Press Director Lisa Bayer. “As the United States approaches its 250^th anniversary in 2026, these online resources about the thirteenth colony will help students, teachers, and all citizens to better understand the diversity and complexity of our early national history.”

The titles will be available and discoverable as open digital editions at the following sites:

•UGA Press’s Manifold platform

•Affordable Learning Georgia

•Digital Library of Georgia / Digital Public Library of America Exchange and Open Bookshelf

•EBSCO ebooks Open Access Monograph Collection

•Project MUSE

•Books at JSTOR

•HathiTrust

Individual titles will also be available to purchase as print paperback and Kindle editions.