This volume covers a range of topics, from painted, vernacular nineteenth-century furniture and the history of painted surfaces in Georgia to color innovations in folk pottery and the conservation of ornamental painting and stained glass in historic Georgia homes. Heavily illustrated, A Colorful Past adds to the history of the state through a mix of research, scholarship, and personal narrative, as in Diane Barrett's article on the tradition of African American quilting, which combines all three. Other contributors to the volume are Ashley Callahan, Dale Couch, Susan Neill, Sarah Hill, Geoffrey Steward, Rick Crown, Maryellen Higginbotham, Dean Taylor, and Michael Crocker.