Grace Elizabeth Hale

Grace Elizabeth Hale studies twentieth-century United States culture and Southern regional history as a historian attentive to music, art, and social movements. She teaches American studies and history at Virginia and has written about race, rebellion, photography, labor, and popular culture. Cool Town reconstructs the community that formed around music and art in Athens, Georgia, during the late 1970s and 1980s. The 2020 University of North Carolina Press volume pairs historical analysis with Hale's memories as a student, band member, and business owner in the scene. It traces networks of performers, artists, venues, and friends that helped bands such as the B-52's and R.E.M. emerge while building alternative ways of living and making culture. Hale's earlier books include Making Whiteness and A Nation of Outsiders. Cool Town extends those interests by asking how cultural outsiders create institutions and identities. Its firsthand perspective is balanced by a historian's attention to regional politics, economic change, and inheritances from earlier Southern movements.