Grace Elizabeth Hale (NHC Fellow, 2002–03; 2025–26)

Grace Elizabeth Hale writes about the history of twentieth-century America and the regional culture of the South for both academic and general audiences. Her most recent research has focused on uncovering untold and forgotten stories of the rural and small-town South. She is the author of In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning; Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture; A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America; and Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. Her essays and op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, and CNN, and she writes regularly about photography and other forms of visual art for museum catalogs and photo books and in her series Shutter, published by Southern Cultures.

Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. A former Carnegie Fellow, she has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the Institute for Historical Studies, and Virginia Humanities. Her current project, They Don’t Own Us: Harlan County, Kentucky and the Past and Future of Working Class America, tells the dramatic story of the first strike in US history to successfully adopt the tactics of the 1960s social movements and what it reveals about the forgotten history of labor’s fight to save the American Dream in the 1970s. It will be published by HarperCollins in 2026.

Selected Publications

• Hale, Grace. In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2023.
• Hale, Grace. Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
• Hale, Grace. “The High and Lonesome Art of John Cohen and Roscoe Halcomb.” Southern Cultures, November 2020.
• Hale, Grace. A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Hale, Grace. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.

Fellowship Work Summary, 2002–03

Grace Elizabeth Hale wrote the introduction and four of six chapters for her book Rebel, Rebel: Outsiders in America, 1945–2000. She also wrote a number of articles, including: “Invisible Men: William Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and the Politics of Loving and Hating the South in the Civil Rights Era, or How Does a Rebel Rebel” in William Faulkner and His Contemporaries, ed. Donald Kartiganer (University of Mississippi Press, forthcoming); “Riding on the Train: Segregation and the Problem of Middle Class Travelers,” in the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Charles Reagan Wilson (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming, 2004); “Review of Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” an exhibit at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, May 1–December 21, 2002, in the Journal of American History (fall 2002); “Whiteness in America,” for Blackwell Publishing’s History Compass Web site (forthcoming, 2003); and “How the Rebel Romance Swallowed the Left, or Why Even Allen Ginsberg Can’t Change the World,” which she submitted to journals for review.