Georgia

The last of the thirteen, founded as a philanthropic experiment that banned slavery and then reversed itself. James Oglethorpe obtained a charter in 1732 for a colony that would resettle England's indebted poor, provide a military buffer against Spanish Florida, and operate without slavery, rum, lawyers or large landholdings - a set of prohibitions intended to produce a society of smallholding soldier-farmers. Savannah was laid out on a grid of squares that survives. The experiment lasted about twenty years: settlers agitated for enslaved labour, arguing they could not compete with South Carolina, and the trustees gave way in 1751, after which the colony became a plantation economy like its neighbour. Cotton then transformed it, especially after Eli Whitney's gin was built in the state in 1793, and Cherokee and Creek removal in the 1830s - the Trail of Tears, carried out in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling - opened the land for it. Sherman's march to the sea in 1864 cut the Confederacy in half. Atlanta rebuilt as a rail and later air hub and became the centre of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King's home city. The state is the largest east of the Mississippi. Atlanta is the capital and largest city. The state is named for George II. Its airport is the busiest in the world by passenger numbers. Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta in 1886. The Okefenokee swamp lies on its southern border. The state is the largest producer of peanuts and pecans in the country, and peaches give it its nickname.

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