The Richards Center 2025 Executive Tour to be held Wednesday, May 28-Saturday, May 31, in Atlanta, GA.

Our group will be staying at the InterContinental Hotel in the lovely Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta. The InterContinental is not historic like our Boston hotel, but I understand it has a terrific spa. 

On Wednesday evening at 6:00 p.m. we will have a reception at the Americano Restaurant located in the InterContinental, followed by dinner at 7:00 p.m.

On Thursday morning, we will set off from the Hotel by bus at 8:45 a.m. where we will tour the Atlanta History Center, including exploring the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama from the 1880s and the Smith Farm, Atlanta’s Oldest surviving farmhouse. After the museum, we will stop for lunch at Mary Mac’s Tea Room, a classic southern restaurant nearby. After lunch, we’ll drive to Stone Mountain Park, the giant bas-relief of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson atop their favorite horses. We’ll spend some time talking about the history of the Park, the relief, and the surrounding neighborhood. On Thursday evening, we will dine at Bones Restaurant, a short distance from the hotel. 

On Friday, we have an early gathering time, at 8:15 a.m., so we can drive out to Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield, arriving a little after 9:00 a.m. We will be joined at Kennesaw Mountain by Keith Bohannon, a historian at the University of West Georgia and Penn State Ph.D., who will lead a battlefield tour with our Persun Visiting Scholar KT Shively of Virginia Commonwealth University. The nature of the Kennesaw Mountain battle makes this tour very accessible; there is not much walking involved. After our morning tour, we will gather for a buffet lunch at Copeland’s before heading back to midtown Atlanta to see the Margaret Mitchell House, followed by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. On Friday evening, we will end the tour with a reception and dinner at the InterContinental.

As usual, we will be joined on the tour by many of our regular Penn State faculty attendees: Cathleen Cahill, Tony Frazier, and Lucien Holness, in addition to History Department Head Amy Greenberg. I am thrilled that Persun Fellow KT Shively will join us for the tour, and we could not be more excited to welcome back Kevin Levin, who will serve again as our guide over the course of our time in Atlanta. Kevin was one of the historians involved in the reinterpretation of both the Atlanta Cyclorama and the Margaret Mitchell House and I know he will bring a particular insight to our trip that we could not get anywhere else. (We can also ask him how his Robert Gould Shaw biography is coming along!)

The total cost of the tour this year will be $2,230/single guest and $3,465/couples. This package includes three nights’ accommodation at the InterContinental, with the option to add additional nights. (For our baseball fans, the Braves are on the road just before the tour, but at home against the Red Sox May 31-June 1.) It also includes three dinners, lunches on Thursday and Friday, all the fees for the private tours and historic sites, and, as always, the expertise of the exceptional scholars at the Richards Center.