Georgia in the American Revolution: An Author Panel

Date and Time

• Thursday, Jul 9, 2026  7pm

Location

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Details

America is celebrating its 250th birthday! Join GPB and The Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation for an engaging panel featuring authors and their works that delve into Georgia’s pivotal role in the American Revolutionary history. Moderated by Orlando Montoya

About the Authors:
Greg Brooking is an award-winning historian of early America, the American Revolution, and the colonial South. He received his PhD in History from Georgia State University and is the author of From Empire to Revolution: Sir James Wright and the Price of Loyalty in Georgia (University of Georgia Press, 2024). He has taught high school and college since 1994, joining the staff of North Springs High Schools (Atlanta, Fulton County, GA) in 2015. Brooking is currently working on his second book, Henry Laurens: A Southern Founder.

Selected Works:

From Empire to Revolution: Sir James Wright and the Price of Loyalty in Georgia
Robert Davis is one of the nation’s foremost scholars on the Revolutionary War in Georgia, and his work has been published extensively in the Journal of the American Revolution. Davis is a retired professor of Genealogy and History who built a research collection at Wallace State Community College, Hanceville, Alabama, which pioneered promoting and teaching local and family history research in a college environment. Davis has a Doctor of Philosophy from Mellen University, a Master of Education in History from the University of North Georgia, and a Master of Arts from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He holds an accounting and computer science certificate from Pickens Area Technical School and has done graduate work at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He is the author of over 2,000 publications on genealogy, history, records, and research, including over forty books and 140 articles in archival, educational, and historical publications.

Selected Works:

Research in Georgia: With a Special Emphasis on the Georgia Department of Archives and History
The Wilkes County Papers
The Georgia Black Book: Morbid, Macabre, and Sometimes Disgusting Records of Genealogical Value
Georgia Citizens and Soldiers of the American Revolution
Ghosts and Shadows of Andersonville
W. Wright Mitchell, President and CEO of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, is an Atlanta native and prominent advocate for safeguarding Georgia’s historic places, with over two decades of leadership in preservation. A former civil litigator, he founded the Buckhead Heritage Society and guided it through a decade of impactful projects, while also contributing numerous articles on Atlanta history to newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. His research centers on colonial Georgia, the Revolutionary War, and the state’s early political development, culminating in his biography of John Adam Treutlen, Georgia’s first elected governor. A graduate of The Lovett School, the University of South Carolina, and Emory University School of Law, Mitchell has served on multiple cultural and preservation boards, including the Atlanta Preservation Center, the Georgia Governor’s Mansion Executive Fine Arts Committee, and the City of Atlanta Sesquicentennial Civil War Commission.

Selected Works:

Georgia’s First Elected Governor: John Adam Treutlen and the American Revolution
Paul M. Pressly received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, served as head of the Savannah Country Day School and then as the director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance from 2005–2017; he now serves as director emeritus. He is a member of the Advisory Council of the University of Georgia Press and of the Board of Editors of the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Pressly is the author of On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World and A Southern Underground Railroad: Black Georgians and the Promise of Spanish Florida and Indian Country. In addition, he served as coeditor of Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast and as assistant editor of African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee. The University of Georgia Press published the four books.

Selected Works:

On the Rim of the Caribbean: Colonial Georgia and the British Atlantic World
A Southern Underground Railroad: Black Georgians and the Promise of Spanish Florida and Indian Country
Michael L. Thurmond was the chief executive officer of DeKalb County, Georgia, from 2017 to 2024. He was a finalist for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in 2025 for his book James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia. His other books are Freedom: Georgia’s Antislavery Heritage, 1733–1865, and A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History. Thurmond previously served in the Georgia legislature, as director of Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, Georgia labor commissioner, and as superintendent of DeKalb schools. In 1997, Thurmond became a distinguished lecturer at the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government. He lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Selected Works:

James Oglethorpe, Father of Georgia: A Founder’s Journey from Slave Trader to Abolitionist
Freedom: Georgia’s Antislavery Heritage, 1733-1865
A Story Untold: Black Men and Women in Athens History
About the Moderator

Orlando Montoya was the Savannah-based news producer for GPB from 1998-2014. He won numerous awards for reporting on coastal issues during that time. In 2022, now in Atlanta, he returned to GPB as the statewide newscaster producer. He studied Radio-Television at the University of Central Florida and has worked at six radio stations in Florida and Georgia.

Accessibility: If you have accessibility needs, please fill out this form or contact Christian Stegall at cstegall@gpb.org.