Grace Elizabeth Hale is the Commonwealth Professor of American Studies and History at the University of Virginia. An award-winning historian and internationally recognized expert on modern American culture and the regional culture of the U.S. South, she has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The American Scholar, Slate and CNN’s website, and has appeared as an expert on southern history on CNN, C-SPAN and PBS. A recent Carnegie Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the National Humanities Center, the Gilder Lehrman Foundation, the American Historical Association, and the American Association of University Women. The author of three previous books, including MAKING WHITENESS: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, she lives in Charlottesville, VA.

Books by Grace Elizabeth Hale

In the Pines: A Lynching, A Lie, A Reckoning

by Grace Elizabeth Hale - History, Nonfiction, True Crime

Grace Hale was home from college when she first heard the family legend. In 1947, while her beloved grandfather had been serving as a sheriff, he prevented a lynch mob from killing a Black man who was in jail on suspicion of raping a white woman --- only for the suspect to die the next day during an escape attempt. Years later, Hale revisited this story. The more she learned about what had happened that day, the less sense she could make of her family's version of events. With the support of a Carnegie fellowship, she immersed herself in the investigation. What she discovered would upend everything she thought she knew about her family, the tragedy and this haunted strip of the South --- because Johnson's death was actually a lynching. But guilt did not lie with a faceless mob.