Atlanta

The financial and media capital of the American South, Atlanta has always found its formula for success through compromise. After the Civil War left it burned down to the red clay, this upcountry Georgia city reemerged, phoenix-like, by embracing a New South of industry and marketing. The Atlanta Constitution helped bring about a series of World's Fair–like expositions, such as the 1895 international expo that featured the “Atlanta Compromise” speech of black leader Booker T. Washington. Eventually, justice caught up with this attempted compromise on racial segregation, leading to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. New compromises over race were reached, led by the Chamber of Commerce, City Hall, and native son Martin Luther King Jr. This set the stage for untrammeled growth of the metropolitan area and a positive international image symbolized by Ted Turner's Cable News Network (CNN). In the twenty-first century, the challenge for Atlanta's news media was to recover some measure of civic influence after so much of civic culture had been compromised, in the negative sense, by the sprawl of this hustling city.

With a name coined in 1845 from the feminization of Western & Atlantic Railroad, Atlanta quickly evolved from a rail terminal to a major crossroad. City boosters touted Atlanta's ideal location. Temperate in its seasons and a good in-between spot for the eastern United States, Atlanta would become an airline hub with the busiest airport in the country, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, named for two of the city's mayors. The city limits stopped growing in 1950 and its population peaked in the early 1970s just below half a million, with white flight leaving a black majority and black political control. But the 20-county Metropolitan Statistical Area was the fastest-growing metro area in the country by 2005, with 4,768,685 residents.