This social and cultural history of the New South's ""Gate City"" looks at the variety of public amusements available to Atlantans from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of the Great Depression, including theater, vaudeville, dime museums, movies, radio, and classical, blues, and country music. Revealed in the ways its people embraced or condemned everything from burlesque to opera is an Atlanta unsure of its identity and acutely sensitive of its image in the eyes of the nation.