Images of Modern America

The physical connections to most American presidents are deeply rooted in the past and unfamiliar. One can no longer see Washington's birthplace or William Henry Harrison's log cabin. Plains, Georgia, is different, and the attachment Americans have for it remains truly unique. Jimmy Carter in Plains: The Presidential Hometown tells the inspirational story of how one man and his community transformed a nation. When Jimmy Carter, a one-term governor of Georgia, announced his candidacy for president, few took him seriously. Yet, in just two years, he managed to pull off a spectacular and unprecedented victory, thanks to his personal style of politicking and the support of his hometown. Many of his neighbors campaigned for him, and they became known as the Peanut Brigade. Crowds started to flock to the sleepy hamlet of Plains, making celebrities out of the candidate's mother, younger brother, and daughter. The exceptional photographs of Charles W. Plant guide the reader through the 1976 election, which made Plains America's hometown.

Craving a blast of nostalgia with a side of pecans? Pull over and explore Stuckey's, the Georgia highway staple.

Beginning as a single roadside stand selling pecans in Eastman, Georgia, by the 1950s, the name Stuckey's was synonymous throughout the South with candy, souvenirs, clean restrooms, and the other necessities of automobile travel. During the 1960s, the Stuckey's stores moved into the new frontier of the interstate highways, where quite often they sat alone at the exits like oases in the middle of a desert. Their bright aqua-colored rooftops were a welcome beacon for those who had been driving long distances. Travel has changed a lot since then, but Stuckey's can still be found along the nation's highways, still providing dozens of types of candy and nuts, plus the same mix of souvenirs, as always. Anyone need a rubber alligator or a pecan log?

Since May 21, 1932, tourists have been making the trip to the top of Lookout Mountain to stroll through what pioneers as far back as the 1820s called the rock city. This collection of huge boulders in a wild array of shapes and sizes was developed as an attraction by Garnet Carter, the inventor of modern miniature golf, and his wife, Frieda, a devotee of European fairy tales. Rock City Gardens quickly became one of the most famous tourist attractions in the Southeast, especially after Carter started a program of painting advertisements on barn roofs. During the post–World War II baby-boom era, Rock City became even more of a destination with the additions of Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Village.

Many of the dynamics associated with the United States in the mid-20th century had not yet touched the tranquil northeast Atlanta community of Virginia-Highland in 1950. The next quarter-century would be very different. A wave of change—the civil rights movement, public school integration, the highway department's attempt to build an expressway through the community, declining real estate, the advent of suburban flight, an emerging new counterculture, and the bitter antiwar movement—provided an overlapping series of challenges that could have torn the neighborhood apart. Against all odds, it did not. Citizens organized to support public schools, defeat the highway, protect the remaining housing, create parks, and preserve their community. They created an eclectic, entrepreneurial spirit and an unpretentious culture that came to define modern intown living. Preserving the essential features of their booming community soon became a new challenge.

From the early 1960s to the present, perhaps no college town in America has changed as much as Athens, Georgia. Over the course of 50 years, the city experienced desegregation at all levels of education, encountered all types of activism and demonstrations, and established an unparalleled music scene that still flourishes. Beginning in the 1980s, University of Georgia athletic teams began winning national championships and continue to do so, the 1996 Olympics came to Athens, and the downtown district is no longer a retail center but a 24-hour central city with more restaurants, bars, and eclectic shops than one can count. Athens is no longer the sleepy, small college town it once was, but truly "the Classic City" in every sense of the name.