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South's fiscal past detailed in exhibit

A bill of sale for a slave is one of hundreds of documents on display at the Atlanta History Center's new exhibit, "Old Money, New Money: The Rise of Southern Capitalism" — an unabashed look at the upside and downside of 150 years of Southern economic and business history.

Unlike most Southern history, written in the grand sweep of big events, this is an on-the-street look at the deeds, bonds, bills of sale, stock certificates, bank notes, posters and other documents that made the economy work.

The exhibit covers the region from its slave-based economy of the early 1800s to the 1930s New Deal — the historical dividing line between the South that President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 called "the nation's No. 1 economic problem" and the Sun Belt economic dynamo of the past 50 years.

Read entire article at Atlanta Journal-Constitution