Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Tennessee
Like most people who make history, Clark Byers had something else on his mind.
A gracious antebellum city of stern-wheelers and cotton money; a restless, violent city with a hot grain of genius at its heart; a city of calamity, desolation, and rebirth; a city that changed the way the whole world hears music. It’s all the same city, and it is this year’s Great American Place. Thomas Childers answers a summons to Memphis, Tennessee.
Bessie Smith was the greatest blues singer of all time, and her influence still permeates popular music, though almost no one listens to her records. Here's an appreciation by an eminent jazz singer.
The steam calliope’s sprightly rendition of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” bounces off immense lock walls at the Kentucky Dam.
The GIs came home to find that a political machine had taken over their Tennessee county. What they did about it astounded the nation.
In McMinn County, Tennessee, in the early 1940s, the question was not if you farmed, but where you farmed. Athens, the county seat, lay between Knoxville and Chattanooga along U.S. Highway 11, which wound its way through eastern Tennessee.
What has befallen “the greatest peacetime achievement of twentieth-century America”s since the New Deal
In recent years, as the energy crisis has developed, and bureaucracies in Washington have wrestled with little success to solve it, and Congress has moved slower than a West Virginia coal train even to agree on a battle strategy, some Americans have proposed
The “Monkey Trial” brought two ideologies into a great conflict, and it was very, very hot
The Union stood in danger of losing an entire army at Chattanooga. Then U. S. Grant arrived, and directed the most dramatic battle of the Civil War
On October 17, 1863, aboard a railroad car in Indianapolis, Indiana, General Ulysses S. Grant met for the first time Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.
A choice between life and honor is a fearful one for any man. Here is the unforgettable story of how it was made by a twenty-one-year-old Confederate private.
The dawn seemed reluctant to break through the dismal skies over middle Tennessee on November 27, 1863, and by ten o’clock the gray clouds had given way to rain. The drops fell on soldiers of the 81st Ohio Infantry drawn up around a gallows on Seminary Ridge, just outside the town of Pulaski, and on a slender youngster in gray seated on a coffin in an army wagon that rumbled toward the hollow square of troops.
Surprised and almost overwhelmed, he stubbornly refused to admit defeat. His cool conduct saved his army and his job
Featured Authors
