Encyclopedia

Congress established this federal recreation area located along the Tennessee-Kentucky border in northwest Middle Tennessee in 1964. Land Between the Lakes (LBL) is a 170,000-acre peninsula between the Tennessee Valley Authority-created Kentucky Lake (1944) and the U.S. Corps of Engineers-created…

After the Revolutionary War, North Carolina had little or no money in its treasury. Faced with accumulating debts to soldiers and military suppliers, the state began to grant or transfer its western land to individuals to pay for war service…

Landmarkism was a nineteenth-century Baptist movement arising in the South, west of the Appalachians, which asserted the sole validity and unbroken succession of Baptist churches from the New Testament era. This exclusivistic ecclesiology promoted the idea that the term "church"…

In 1882 Lane College, then the "C.M.E. High School," was founded by the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (now Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, CME) in America. Initially Bishop William Henry Miles, the first bishop of the CME Church, presided over the…

Fourth bishop of the Colored (Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church, Isaac Lane was born March 4, 1834, in Madison County. Lane grew to manhood as a slave on the plantation of Cullen Lane. At age nineteen Isaac Lane married Frances Ann…

Laura Carter Holloway Langford was born in Nashville in 1843. Her birth date is often given as 1848, but census records from 1860, 1870, and 1910, as well as various genealogical databases, confirm the earlier date. Laura was one of fourteen children of…

In November 1835 the Tennessee General Assembly established Lauderdale County from portions of Tipton, Dyer, and Haywood Counties. The county was named for Lieutenant Colonel James Lauderdale, who was killed in the battle of New Orleans. The county covers 477…

A planter-soldier for whom Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is named, William Lauderdale was born in Virginia between 1780 and 1785, the son of a prominent Sumner County family. Lauderdale first served as a lieutenant under Andrew Jackson in the Tennessee Volunteers…

The origins of law in Tennessee can be traced to a variety of sources, notably English common law and colonial North Carolina statutes. The 1796 constitution provided that all laws then in force should continue until replaced by the legislature.…

On October 21, 1817, the Tennessee General Assembly created Lawrence County from territory acquired by treaty with the Chickasaw Indians. A section of Hickman County and a small portion of Giles County were included in its boundaries. Local government was…

This Nashville native rose to the navy's top ranks and received national honor after six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, during which time he wrote "Oh Tennessee, My Tennessee," the official state poem. Lawrence excelled at…

James E. Lawson Jr. made a significant mark on the history of the Civil Rights movement in Tennessee and in the South. He is best known in Tennessee history as the Vanderbilt Divinity School student who was expelled in 1960…

Albert Miller Lea, a prominent chief engineer of the State of Tennessee, was born in Knoxville in 1805. Lea learned his engineering skills in the army. He entered West Point and graduated fifth in a class of thirty-three in 1831.…

A key figure in the reform and prohibition movements and a major player in the early twentieth-century Democratic Party, Luke Lea was prominent in Tennessee history during the early twentieth century. A descendant of the pioneer Overton and Cocke families,…

This organization formed prior to the ratification of the Suffrage Amendment when thirty-five of the required thirty-six states had ratified the amendment. Tennessee suffragists attended the last national suffrage convention in February 1920 and returned home to Tennessee to organize…

On January 1, 1918, 12 students from four states met with Nora Chambers in an upstairs room of the Church of God Publishing House in Cleveland, Tennessee. This first class meeting of the Church of God's Bible Training School (BTS)…