The Fair Park on Lomb Ave. was one of Birmingham's earliest drive-ins. (Birmingham Public Library Archives.)

A Light at the Edge of Town: Drive-In Movie Theaters in Alabama
By Aaron Welborn

At one time, Alabama was home to 96 drive-in movie theaters. As of 1990, that number had dwindled to three. Today, a total of ten Alabama drive-ins are open for business. Such a small increase might be hard to appreciate if you didn't know that, only a decade ago, drive-ins appeared to be all but extinct. But recently, the nationwide decline of drive-in theaters that began in the 1950s has actually started to reverse. Drive-ins are coming back, if only gradually and in just a few pockets around the country-including Alabama. Such a development seems strange. Drive-ins are the product of a different time, a different America. How, then, does one explain their resurgence? To answer that question, one needs to return to their history, beginning in the 1930s, when the drive-in got off to its inauspicious start.

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William R. King, an engraving by W.H. Dougal from a daguerreotype by Whitehurst (Washington, D.C., 1854). (Courtesy Daniel Fate Brooks.)

The Faces of William Rufus King
By Daniel Fate Brooks

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the death of William Rufus King, the only Alabamian ever to hold a United States executive office, as well as the only official ever to take the oath of office on foreign soil. During his lifetime, William Rufus King was a household name. But relatively few Alabamians remember him today, or what he did. Historian Daniel Fate Brooks recalls King's life as one of America's most admired politicians of the nineteenth century, and one of Alabama's earliest celebrities, whose handsome good looks and worldly sophistication won him many friends and admirers. But King is perhaps best remembered for taking the oath of office as Franklin Pierce's vice president while living in Havana, Cuba, where he was hoping to recover from tuberculosis. His term lasted only a few short weeks, before he sailed home for Selma, the town he named, and died, having never performed a single official act as Vice President.

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Sherman White Jr. wearing his wings of silver. (Courtesy James White.)

Patriots of Color: An Alabama Family in the Good War
By Wesley Phillips Newton

Before the Civil Rights Movement, African Americans faced another challenge: World War II.

If you had asked Sherman and Nettie White, they would have told you they were no different from thousands of other families in Montgomery whose children went off to WWII. In each of their three children, the Whites had instilled a strong sense of personal responsibility and civic duty. But there was one essential difference. The children of Sherman and Nettie White were defending a democratic society that, at that time, was badly flawed with regards to the acceptance and treatment of their race. This fact would become even clearer after the war. Wesley Phillips Newton tells the story of one African American family who risked everything for a better life and a better world. Their dedication brought them disaster, pain, and took one of their own flesh and blood. Yet to them, it was a necessary step towards a more equal life.

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At the entrance to the Brookside mine in Birmingham, miners pause for a postcard photographer. (Adolphe Selige Publishing Co., St. Louis-Liepzig.)

Digging "Stone Coal"
By Whitney R. Telle

With the possible exception of cotton, no other commodity has so shaped the economic and cultural destiny of Alabama as the mile-thick wedge of coal under its rugged hills and hollows. For ages, this invisible treasure lay undisturbed beneath the state's landscape before anyone recognized its value. But the secret could not remained buried forever. Whitney R. Telle recounts the history of early coal mining in Alabama, and explains how the discovery of a simple fossil fuel rapidly changed the way people lived and worked throughout the state. From the enterprising industrialists who made fortunes in mining, to rowdy flatboatmen who transported coal downriver, to black and white laborers who risked death in the mines, the story of digging "stone coal" is the story of Alabama in the making.

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