This book explores the changing food culture of the urban American South during the Jim Crow era by examining how race, ethnicity, class, and gender contributed to the development and maintenance of racial segregation in public eating places. Focusing primarily on the 1900s to the 1960s, Angela Jill Cooley identifies the cultural differences between activists who saw public eating places like urban lunch counters as sites of political participation and believed access to such spaces a right of citizenship, and white supremacists who interpreted desegregation as a challenge to property rights and advocated local control over racial issues. Significant legal changes occurred across this period as the federal government sided at first with the white supremacists but later supported the unprecedented progress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which—among other things—required desegregation of the nation's restaurants. Because the culture of white supremacy that contributed to racial segregation in public accommodations began in the white southern home, Cooley also explores domestic eating practices in nascent southern cities and reveals how the most private of activities—cooking and dining— became a cause for public concern from the meeting rooms of local women's clubs to the halls of the U.S. Congress.

For close to a hundred years Blount Springs was the center of society for many of the elite of Alabama and the South. It served as a watering place and social gathering spot serving the planter class and later the industrialists of the New South. Patrons came to enjoy the health-giving water, dancing, spirits and especially legal gambling Preserving history is an important aspect of our society that, unfortunately, is often overlooked in our fast-paced, I want it now world. Slow down and take a look at a time when leisure and socializing were the preferred way to spend time. Look back at a cure for life's ills and pains that were available at the "Saratoga of the South".