Transportation and Technology

In 1962, a plane crash at Orly Field in Paris claimed the lives of more than 100 Atlantans, leaving a deep scar on the city’s cultural fabric. Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., personally affected and burdened with responsibility, navigated the aftermath, ensuring the respectful return of the deceased. The tragedy unified Atlanta, inspiring donations for a memorial arts center, despite the irreplaceable loss and enduring grief experienced by the community and the victims’ families.

Street names offer insights into a city’s history and its evolving perceptions of past figures. In Atlanta, Lindbergh Drive is named after Charles Lindbergh, an American aviation pioneer who was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic. Lindbergh’s achievements made him an international hero, but his later controversial affiliations and remarks led to significant public criticism. Many places that bore his name in the U.S. have since been renamed due to changing public sentiments.

Kenan Research Center collections document a wide range of historical themes and topics about the history of the Atlanta region.

Atlanta History Center is the repository of millions of pages of archival documents and photographs, and tens of thousands of books, maps, museum artifacts, oral history interviews, and much more, with the collection growing daily. For the first time in the institution’s nearly 100-year history, we are excited to announce that this process will now operate from a new search tool housed on our website.

Long before workers at Starbucks and Amazon began fighting for the right to collectively bargain, workers at Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills fought to unionize, creating a blueprint for those in the present-day.

When driving down a busy street in Atlanta, you may find yourself on a different road without making a turn. These seemingly nonsensical street name changes are due to past residential segregation practices enacted when white Atlantans did not want to share the same address as Blacks.

The Negro Motorist Green Book (later Negro Travelers’ Green Book) was an annual guidebook for African American travelers. First published in 1936, the pamphlet provided a list of Black-friendly restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs, lounges, and services in places across the country including Atlanta.

Norfolk Southern, one of the nation’s major railroad systems, recently relocated its headquarters to Atlanta. The company celebrated its move with a major donation of archival materials from predecessor company Southern Railway to Atlanta History Center. We look back on the history of Southern Railway and reflect on the importance of this iconic railroad to Atlanta and the Southeast.

Seventy-one. That’s a current count on how many streets there are in Atlanta that bear the name, “Peachtree.” This is the first in a series of blog posts exploring the history behind popular Atlanta street names.

In 1962, Mayor Ivan Allen, Jr. ordered the construction of a barricade served to sever the main line connecting the white and Black sections of the Cascade Heights neighborhood.

Learn off-the-script facts about railroads and the making of Atlanta.

In advance of the 1996 Olympic Games, organizers in Atlanta worked to harness the power of new technologies to showcase the city as cutting edge and progressive—just as many host cities before them had done.

Linda Fay reacts to the first airport security instrument tested at Atlanta Municipal Airport (now Hartsfield-Jackson) ca. 1960.

An unidentified woman brings her horse to a halt at a WHOA sign.