In Bulloch County—the rural east Georgia county that's home to Georgia Southern University—the local Historical Society has been seeking the exact location of the "Irish Hill Cemetery," long mentioned in district lore. One find, in 2001, was a burial plot with a tombstone bearing the inscription, "Our Mother...Born County Kerry, Ireland...1823." This tantalizing glimpse into the past hints at a pervasive Irish presence in Georgia, youngest of the thirteen colonies and the largest state east of the Mississippi. Two major immigrant strands run through the story of Irish Georgia. The original strand is the mainly Presbyterian Scotch-Irish (or Ulster-Scots) who, entering North America from Ulster after 1717, played a decisive role in the Revolutionary War. The second strand is the largely Catholic, and sometimes Gaelic-speaking, native Irish, many of whom crossed the Atlantic in so-called "coffin ships" to escape the Great Famine of 1845-49. Irish influence is everywhere present in Georgia, including how the State speaks and writes itself, from placenames like Dublin—and Burke and Blakely Counties—to literature. Significantly, "Georgia's second founder," its second Royal Governor (1757-1760), was the Co. Monaghan native and naval explorer Henry Ellis, who proved an exceptionally gifted administrator. A Protestant, Ellis penned the Royal Society paper, "Heat of the Weather in Georgia"! In the 1760s, another Irish Protestant, the Co. Armagh native George Galphin, co-sponsored the heavily Irish settlement called Queensborough, near what would become Louisville, Georgia's third capital. Galphin and his partners, Irishman John Rae and Scotsman Lachlan McGillivray, advertised the venture in Irish newspapers, and Ulster-Scots settlers arrived by boat in 1668 and 1671. That the slave owner and Indian trader Galphin fathered children with African-American and Creek women underscores the complexity of Irish Georgia. Working in partnership, the Center for Irish Studies at Georgia Southern University, Atlanta-based Redwine Productions, and Georgia Public Broadcasting are creating two scholarly, accessible television documentaries about the Irish in Georgia: one with a Scotch-Irish focus; the other privileging the Catholic Irish. The programs, each an hour long, are supplemented by a content-rich website that, among other things, offers special educational sections. These provide lesson plans, bibliographies, podcast feeds, primary source materials, and more for three constituencies: elementary-school pupils, middle-school pupils, and college students. Understanding how the Irish became Georgians can only enlighten us in the twenty-first century, when immigration is again a front-burner issue throughout America. Furthermore, the global reach of television will cause the documentaries to open up Irish-related heritage tourism in Georgia as never before. The three basic project partners actively seek transatlantic and international media organizations to collaborate in the production and distribution of The Irish in Georgia. In addition, they warmly invite those passionate about Ireland and Georgia—individuals, foundations, and corporations—to become stakeholders and sponsors. All contributions will be carefully and prominently acknowledged. Incorporating work by and the voices of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, and Georgia's living Irish, our two documentaries collate the many experiences of the Irish in the Empire State of the South. The Irish immigrant or diaspora narrative is complicated, fascinating, and important—and not without dark episodes. Replete with music from lively jigs to "high lonesome" ballads, it provides its own extraordinary soundtrack, which the documentaries fully exploit as they explain not only the Georgia that the Irish encountered and helped develop, but also the Ireland that they carried with them in memory and passed on to their American children and grandchildren. Certain events in Ireland, especially the United Irishmen's Rising of 1798 and Robert Emmet's Rising of 1803, were influenced by American happenings and ideas; furthermore, monies sent from Georgia and America proved crucial to republican resistance and famine relief back in Ireland. The documentaries are thoroughgoing. To well-known tales, such as how Savannah's St. Patrick's Day parade evolved into the nation's second biggest, we bring wonderful detail and nuance. Consider, for example, a major faculty-student research initiative, begun at Georgia Southern University around a decade ago: a digitized oral-history archive of self-identified Irish Savannahians talking about what the city's famous parade and its multiple Irish fraternal organizations and parochial institutions mean to them. Significant entities, such as the Hibernian Society of Savannah—America's oldest Irish society—have a special relationship with the Center for Irish Studies at Georgia Southern, while award-winning Redwine Productions enjoys close ties with Scotch-Irish communities nationwide. Its current multi-state project is America's Other Irish, a two-hour television documentary that charts how Presbyterian Ulster settlers progressed from Northeastern ports-of-entry to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and, thence, to the Shenandoah Valley, the Carolina Piedmont, the Savannah River, and—after the Revolution—the frontier West.    The Center for Irish Studies, Georgia Southern University One of thirty-five institutions within the University System of Georgia (which includes the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and the Medical College of Georgia), Georgia Southern University is a top choice for new freshman and HOPE scholars. Situated in the beautiful town of Statesboro, fifty miles northwest of Savannah, this hundred-year-old residential university of 16,100 students is the largest and most comprehensive center of higher education in the southern half of Georgia. Its hallmark is a superior undergraduate experience that emphasizes academic distinction, excellent teaching, and student success. Georgia Southern University proudly houses the only Center for Irish Studies in the University System of Georgia. At the heart of a region distinguished by rich and diverse Irish traditions—both native-Irish and Ulster-Scots—the Center is a "full-service" resource for Irish education, scholarship, business, and culture. Since its founding in 1995, it has helped students, faculty, and the public interrogate, understand, and enjoy the histories and geographies, realities and fictions, and economies and aptitudes of all parts and all peoples of the dazzling island of Ireland. With rigor, scruple, and imagination, it engages the great sweep of Irish and Irish-American experience, from ancient Gaelic times to contemporary Ireland: a high-tech powerhouse, earth's "most global" economy. The Center is a pace-setter in bringing top-quality artists, performers, and lecturers, as well as visiting scholar-teachers, to South Georgia. In 2005, well over three thousand people attended its public offerings! The Center's student-centered ethos is reflected in its provision of an Interdisciplinary Minor, Study-in-Ireland programs, undergraduate scholarships, and Club Gael, a student club. Dr. Frederick Sanders established the Center for Irish Studies and directed it until his retirement in 2004. His successor, Howard Keeley, is a 2004 graduate of the doctoral program in English at Princeton University.   Redwine Productions Based in Atlanta and dedicated to films about Irish-American links, Redwine Productions was founded by Chris Moser and the late Tony McAuley. Not only did McAuley, an Ulsterman, create groundbreaking programming for the BBC, he also proved central to the modern revival of traditional Irish music. The superstar singer Enya dedicated an album to McAuley to thank him for the break he provided her by using her music in The Celts, his renowned six-part BBC television series. A former newswriter with CNN, Louisiana State University-graduate Chris Moser has a stellar record as an independent producer. The British Council chose him as one of nine American scholars for its 1994 Scotch-Irish historians' tour of Northern Ireland. That same year, Moser received the Governor of Georgia's Award in the Humanities for his career achievements in film-making and public broadcasting. PBS-Plus distributed his 2001 documentary The Day Atlanta Stood Still throughout the United States. An exploration of the June 1962 air crash at Orly, Paris, in which 106 Atlantans perished, the work garnered a 2002 Green Eyeshade Award for Excellence in Journalism.  Moser's reputation is such that he easily gathers world-class teams for his projects. Working directly with Moser on The Irish in Georgia is Melinda Shannon Freels, Associate Producer at Redwine. Freels is Vice-President of the Ulster-Scots Society of America, a Director of Ulster Project Atlanta, and an internationally recognized genealogist. With extensive fund-raising experience, she has worked on numerous historical and conservation projects, not least John Anderson's musical On Eagle's Wing: The Scotch-Irish Journey, which exists both as a stage show and a television broadcast. Redwine's consultants include some of the world's most distinguished historians and scholars. Georgia Public Broadcasting Reaching each of Georgia's 159 counties and portions of adjoining states, Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) operates nine television and fifteen radio stations. It produces original programming, and it also distributes high-quality shows from such entities as PBS, NPR, and the BBC. Bringing cutting-edge informational media to the classroom, GPB Education, the organization's newest division, provides a wealth of resources to Georgia's teachers and its 1.5 million students. GPB's dedication to The Irish in Georgia is a natural extension of its mission to educate, inform, and entertain the citizens of the dynamic, diverse, and exciting State of Georgia.   Visit us at http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/%7Eirish/