Encyclopedia

Joseph H. Hamilton, the Landon C. Garland Distinguished Professor of Physics at Vanderbilt University, was born in Ferriday, Louisiana. Hamilton has led research into the discovery that nuclei of atoms have many possible coexisting shapes rather than a fixed shape.…

One of the earliest settlement areas in Tennessee is Hancock County. In a 1673 letter to John Richard of London, Abraham Wood reported James Needham and Gabriel Arthur's journey into the area: "Eight dayes jorny down this river lives a…

Painter and portraitist Avery Handly was born in Nashville and graduated from Wallace University School and Vanderbilt University, where he majored in English and was influenced by the Fugitives. His first art instruction, at age twelve, was from Miss Emma…

W. C. Handy, African American composer, bandleader, publisher, and "Father of the Blues," combined the contemporary ragtime and Latin rhythms he had encountered in vaudeville, minstrel shows, and extensive travels with the black folk music of his heritage into the…

Born near Guntown, Itawamba County, Mississippi, Cornelius H. Hankins was the sixth of eight children of Reverend Edward Locke Hankins and Annie Mary McFadden Hankins. He contracted smallpox after his mother cared for Confederate soldiers. As a result, he was…

Influential and respected Tennessee Supreme Court justice William J. Harbison was born in Columbia, the son of William Joshua Harbison and Eunice Elizabeth Kinzer Harbison. Harbison (B.A, magna cum laude, Vanderbilt University, 1947; J.D., Vanderbilt University School of Law, 1950)…

Located in the upper plateaus of southwestern Tennessee near the headwaters of the Big Hatchie River, Hardeman County has an area of 655 square miles. The county was formed from the Jackson Purchase and attached to Hardin County, then to…

The story of Hardin County begins with the prehistoric mound builders of the Woodland and Mississippian Periods. Savannah, the modern county seat, is built partially within a wall and trench and amid a line of fourteen mounds on a bluff…

Leading Tennessee agriculturist and nationally acclaimed stock breeder William G. Harding was born in 1808 near Nashville. Harding was educated at the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy in Middletown, Connecticut. Two years after his first wife, Mary Selena McNairy,…

A family business that grew from a backyard foundry to a major commercial enterprise, Hardwick Stove Company shaped Bradley County's industrial history for over one hundred years. Its founder, Christopher Hardwick, began building cast iron stoves in his Cleveland, Tennessee,…

This Williamson County property is the most significant extant historic farm associated with the modern Tennessee Walking Horse industry. In 1935 Wirt Harlin established the farm, which included the historic Maney-Sidway House, on the northern outskirts of Franklin on U.S.…

"Big" and "Little" Harpe were notorious outlaws on the frontier of the Old Southwest. The two committed murder and highway robbery indiscriminately around the frontier town of Knoxville and in other parts of East Tennessee and Kentucky. The legend of…