The Georgia Open History Library (GOHL) includes open-access digital editions of single-authored scholarly titles and two multivolume series, comprising almost fifty individual volumes in history and primary documents. The open text library was generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States in 2026. Our title selection, not surprisingly, focuses on the colony and eventual statehood of Georgia and its relationship with other groups, colonies, countries, and the new Union. It includes studies of Adams and Jefferson; the American Revolution in Georgia; the Creek Nation; the papers of Revolutionary War general Lachlan McIntosh and the colony’s visionary founder James Edward Oglethorpe; and records of the German-speaking Protestant Salzburger settlement.

The books included in the GOHL were chosen by an advisory board of esteemed Georgia historians for their broad historical and intellectual significance throughout the colonial and early statehood periods. The majority of the volumes are primary sources, documents, and records that have been the wellspring for most of the research on this period in Georgia history since their original publications.Together the library constitutes the most fulsome portrait of early Georgia and its inhabitants—European, Indigenous, and diasporic African—available from primary sources. Of particular importance are the colonial records of the state of Georgia and what are widely regarded as the essential supplements to those records: the journals and/or letters of the Earl of Egmont, Peter Gordon, and Henry Newton, as well as the two publications of General James Edward Oglethorpe’s own writings.