Overview
- The Atlanta History Center opened the multi-room More Perfect Union on July 10, 2026, replacing the three-decade Turning Point exhibit in the renovated DuBose Gallery at its Buckhead campus.
- The exhibit displays rare items from the center’s collection, including an original printing of Frederick Douglass’s speech, the Confederate flag that flew over Atlanta at surrender, the 127th US Colored Infantry Regiment flag, soldiers’ diaries, receipts documenting the sale of enslaved people, and handwritten orders from General William T. Sherman.
- Curators frame the show to trace Atlanta’s arc from antebellum tensions through the Civil War and Reconstruction and to draw explicit lines to the Civil Rights Movement and contemporary civic debates.
- More Perfect Union is open to the public during regular museum hours and is included with standard admission, and museum staff say the project will be delivered in a second phase titled Hard Hand of War that focuses on soldiers, weapons and mass production; reporting differs on whether that phase will open in winter 2026 or in 2027.
- Officials and curators say the exhibition aims to deepen public understanding of Atlanta’s role in national history and to humanize the era by foregrounding personal documents and objects that make the experience of slavery, combat and displacement tangible for visitors.