Grace Elizabeth Hale Boeken

"In Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale examines the town's flourishing as a Southern alternative culture mecca, emerging out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s to become home for a set of artistic, social, and political alternatives to northern liberalism or urban punk on the left and Sunbelt Republicanism on the right. In this moment of cultural flourishing, Hale argues, a generation of young white southerners could not or did not see themselves fleeing the region, but also did not fit the cultural or political options available at home. So they blended a DIY ethos, local traditions, and musical and other influences from outside to create their own thing-the "Athens scene"--

Making Whiteness is a profoundly important work that explains how and why whiteness came to be such a crucial, embattled--and distorting--component of twentieth-century American identity.  In intricately textured detail and with passionately mastered analysis, Grace Elizabeth Hale shows how, when faced with the active citizenship of their ex-slaves after the Civil War, white southerners re-established their dominance through a cultural system based on violence and physical separation.  And in a bold and transformative analysis of the meaning of segregation for the nation as a whole, she explains how white southerners' creation of modern "whiteness" was, beginning in the 1920s, taken up by the rest of the nation as a way of enforcing a new social hierarchy while at the same time creating the illusion of a national, egalitarian, consumerist democracy.By showing the very recent historical "making" of contemporary American whiteness and by examining how the culture of segregation, in all its murderous contradictions, was lived, Hale makes it possible to imagine a future outside it. Her vision holds out the difficult promise of a truly democratic American identity whose possibilities are no longer limited and disfigured by race.

In Athens, Georgia in the '80s, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow.