Alabama, United States — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Alabama known for?

The state carries the memory of the Civil Rights Movement, from the marches in Selma to the churches of Birmingham where the campaign for desegregation took shape. Autumn belongs to college football, and the Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn stops the whole state. Huntsville builds rockets.

The US Space and Rocket Center there grew out of the work that sent Americans to the Moon, while down south the white sand of Gulf Shores draws beachgoers to the warm edge of the Gulf of Mexico.

Where is Alabama?

Alabama sits in the Deep South, in the southeast of the United States. Tennessee runs along the north. Georgia lies to the east, Mississippi to the west, and Florida seals off most of the south, leaving Alabama only a narrow reach to the Gulf of Mexico at its southwestern corner. The Gulf shore is narrow. A short strip of beach and marsh opens onto the sea around Mobile Bay.

Inland, the land climbs. The southern end of the Appalachian Mountains reaches into northern Alabama, where the Cumberland Plateau and long ridges rise to Cheaha Mountain, the highest ground in the state. South of the ridges lies the Black Belt, a band of dark, fertile soil curving across the middle of the state that gave the region its name and its old cotton economy.

Below the Black Belt, the coastal plain widens into pine forest and farmland that runs all the way to the sea. Rivers drain it all toward the coast. The Alabama and Tombigbee rivers join north of Mobile Bay and empty through a broad delta, while the Tennessee River loops across the far north.

That delta, the Mobile-Tensaw, spreads a maze of swamp and bayou behind the bay.

What is Alabama like?

Saturdays in autumn belong to football. Nowhere is that truer than in Alabama, where the Crimson Tide of Tuscaloosa and the Auburn Tigers divide loyalties down to the family dinner table, and the Iron Bowl that ends each season settles a year of argument. Music runs just as deep.

The state gave the country the blues out of the Tennessee Valley and the sound of Muscle Shoals, whose small studios drew soul and rock musicians from around the world. Hank Williams sang his way out of the pine country south of Montgomery. Whole towns empty into the stadiums on game day.

Books came from the same soil. Harper Lee set To Kill a Mockingbird in a small Alabama town modeled on her native Monroeville, and her friend Truman Capote grew up nearby. That storytelling streak runs through the whole state.

Faith and food fill the weeks between. Sunday gospel, slow barbecue, and the tangy white sauce of the north all belong to the table here. Down on the coast, Mobile throws the oldest Mardi Gras in the country, a season of parades that predates the one in New Orleans.

What is the history of Alabama?

Alabama entered the Union in 1819, the twenty-second state, carved from land taken from the Muscogee and Cherokee and named for the river and the people who lived along it. Cotton and slavery built its early wealth. Montgomery became the first capital of the Confederacy in 1861.

A century later the state stood at the center of the Civil Rights Movement, from the Montgomery bus boycott to the marches from Selma that pushed the country toward the Voting Rights Act. That struggle reshaped it.

What is the climate of Alabama?

Alabama runs hot and humid. Summers are long and heavy, wettest along the Gulf of Mexico where sea breezes and afternoon thunderstorms build almost daily. Winters stay mild, and snow is rare outside the northern ridges.

The state sits in Dixie Alley, the southern belt where spring and late autumn bring some of the country's most violent tornadoes. Hurricanes push up from the Gulf in late summer, and storms like Ivan have battered Mobile Bay and the coast. Rain falls all year.

How do you get to Alabama?

Most visitors fly into Birmingham, the state's busiest airport, or into Huntsville and Montgomery for the north and the capital. Many simply drive. Alabama lies within a few hours' drive of Atlanta, Nashville, and New Orleans, and the interstates cross it from every direction.

Beachgoers heading for Gulf Shores often land across the line at Pensacola in Florida. Trains on the Crescent line still stop in Birmingham on the run between New Orleans and the northeast. The Gulf keeps a working port at Mobile.