This book tells the story of Ebenezer, a frontier community in colonial Georgia founded by a mountain community fleeing religious persecution in its native Salzburg. This study traces the lives of the settlers from the alpine world they left behind to their struggle for survival on the southern frontier of British America. Exploring their encounters with African and indigenous peoples with whom they had had no previous contact, this book examines their initial opposition to slavery and why they ultimately embraced it. Transatlantic in scope, this study will interest readers of European and American history alike.

Introduction; Part I. From the Old World to the New: 1. The alpine world of Thomas Geschwandel; 2. Expulsion; 3. From Salzburg to Savannah; Part II. Ebenezer: 4. The making of a Pietist Utopia; 5. Governing Ebenezer: the early years; 6. Ebenezer and the struggle over slavery; 7. After slavery; Epilogue: Ebenezer is no more.

James Van Horn Melton is Professor of History at Emory University, where he has served as Chair of both the Department of History and the Department of German Studies. His book The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001) has appeared in Turkish and Spanish translation, and his book Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge University Press, 1988) won the 1990 Biennial Book Prize awarded by the Central European History Society. Melton has held fellowships from the NEH, the SSRC, the Fulbright Program, the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2012-13 he served as President of the Central European History Society.