The University of North Carolina Press’s new trade imprint Ferris and Ferris published Hale’s most recent book Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Culture and Changed American Culture America.  Cool Town draws on her extensive research in the musical recordings and visual art produced in Athens, Georgia in the late 1970s and 1980s (much of it in private hands) as well as on her interviews with over 100 participants and her own memories of playing in a band and owning a music venue there.  She constructs the history of important bands like R.E.M., the B-52s, and Pylon and musicians like Vic Chesnutt and tells the story of the surprising origins of Athens’ world famous bohemia in interactions between members of the local gay community, local folk revivalists, and University of Georgia undergraduates at the margins of the college’s football and Greek dominated campus culture, including art students.  At a time when many Americans wonder how anyone in our radically polarized society can change, she describes how the alternative culture that emerged in Athens and spread across America in the eighties and nineties transformed the lives and politics of young people across the nation.

Hale’s second book A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America (Oxford University Press, 2011) reveals how a fascination with outsiders linked white, middle-class Americans across a variety of post-World War II cultural and political movements—including the folk music rival, the civil rights movement, the New Left, the Christian Right, and the anti-abortion movement—and enabled participants to avoid the implications of their own politics.  This romance proved powerful, shes argue, because it provided a way for many white Americans to reconcile their commitment to individual self-expression and self-expansion with their desire for history and community without facing the contradictions inherent in their desires. Published by Oxford’s trade press division, this book won rare praise as a history of postwar culture liked by critics on both the right and the left, though predictably each side believed Hale was right about the other side and wrong about them.  Her argument remains extremely relevant in the Trump era.

Hale’s first book Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1980-1940 (Pantheon, 1998; Vintage, 1999) made her a nationally and internationally recognized expert on how white Southerners think about race.  Toni Morrison offered the following assessment: “Scholarship, even when thorough, doesn’t always enlighten. For that one needs the kind of surgical insight Grace Hale has applied to her impeccable research.  Making Whiteness is both brilliant and essential.”  Making Whiteness won the Willie Lee Rose Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award and was widely reviewed and praised in newspapers and magazines as well as academic journals. 

In Making Whiteness, Hale argues that white Southerners created segregation or what people at the time often called Jim Crow, the racial order that replaced slavery, in order to maintain white supremacy in a post-Emancipation world.  Because other scholars had examined segregation laws, she focused on culture, on the ways white southerners legitimated their practice of white supremacy in fiction, film, photography, popular and academic history, memoir, poetry, advertising, landscapes, and buildings.  Among other contributions, this work named and defined the horrific practice of "spectacle lynchings" and pioneered the study of lynching photographs.  It also changed how US historians conceptualized segregation by proving that contrary to the claims of segregationists across more than half a century, including the defendants in the Brown decision, segregation was not simply a “response” to racial difference.  Instead, it was a practice that produced the racial identities and differences it claimed to reflect.  Hale found that while the civil rights movement succeeded in destroying segregation laws, it had a much more difficult time changing the culture.  Stories and symbols created to support southern white supremacy like the Confederate monuments in so many towns and cities and the novel and film versions of Gone With the Wind survived the civil rights movement intact.  Twenty years ago, Making Whiteness transformed the subfield of southern history.