Cool Town

Grace Elizabeth Hale

"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"--