The Burnings of Atlanta
While writing about the burning of Atlanta in my blog on Gone with the Wind’s 75th birthday, as an ex-Atlantan, I remembered that the city had been plagued by other fires. Aside from the 1864 blaze set by the Confederates, followed by General Sherman’s notorious conflagration consuming a third of the city, there was also the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917. It arose from four separate, relatively insignificant blazes one quiet May morning and quickly spread the fire department’s resources dangerously thin. Morphing into one enormous incendiary beast, it required the assistance of firefighters from as far away as Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee, to bring it under control. After raging for eleven hours, it consumed 22 million gallons of water and destroyed almost...
Read MoreThe Heart of Darkness
As we enter the final year of the Civil War sesquicentennial, debate continues over whether or not slavery was the primary cause of the conflict. Was the North fighting to free the slaves or to preserve the Union? Would the South really go to war over slavery with only 1.5% of the population owning slaves or was it fighting for state’s rights? An equally important question is why educated, deeply religious men and women allowed this heinous institution to thrive on our shores, justified it from the pulpit and crippled half a fledgling nation. There’s no shortage of material on the subject, but since its history is often skewed by revisionists, an unvarnished look is in order. Nearly as old as mankind, slavery flourished in almost every ancient civilization. It...
Read MoreOne-Man Show
Seventy-five years ago today, the film version of Gone with the Wind premiered in Atlanta. It remains one of the most beloved classics in American cinema and holds the number six spot on the American Film Institute (AFI) list of 100 Greatest American Films. Cast, crew and history concur that the daunting task of transforming book-to-film would have been impossible without the passion and drive of one man, producer David O. Selznick. Flying in the face of naysayers insisting costume epics were passé and that civil war movies always lost money, Selznick Studios paid $50,000 for the screen rights to Margaret Mitchell’s phenomenally successful bestseller only a month after publication. The book, not incidentally, was first entitled Tomorrow Is Another Day and had a...
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