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Founded in 1869 by a group of Philadelphia tailors, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor grew slowly as a secret organization under the leadership of Uriah Stephens. In 1879, when Terence V. Powderly, a machinist and…

In 1786 James White built a fort five miles below the junction of the French Broad and Holston Rivers on the southernmost edge of frontier settlement in present-day East Tennessee. William Blount, governor of the Territory of the United States…

Founded as White's Fort in 1786, Knoxville served as the capital of the Territory South of the River Ohio (or Southwest Territory) and early capital of Tennessee and eventually grew to become the state's third largest city and a major…

Immediately after the Civil War, scores of northern missionaries traveled south to educate the newly freed slaves. These missionary efforts resulted in the establishment of a number of black colleges and universities. One of these schools was Knoxville College, a…

The first newspaper in Tennessee was the Knoxville Gazette, printed initially at Rogersville, Hawkins County, on November 5, 1791. Its editor, printer, and publisher was George Roulstone (1767-1804), who stayed in Rogersville for eleven months before moving the newspaper permanently…

In the case of Knoxville Iron Company v. Harbison (183 U.S. 13) the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an 1899 Tennessee statute requiring cash redemption of store orders and other noncash payments to employees. At issue was a suit brought against…

When the Knoxville Journal ceased operation in 1991, a Knoxville institution died. Although the paper's exact ancestry was sometimes in dispute, the Journal itself liked to claim that it was the descendant of the irascible William G. "Parson" Brownlow's feisty…

Opened in 1961 as the Dulin Gallery of Art, the Knoxville Museum of Art was originally housed in an early twentieth-century neighborhood mansion designed by noted American architect John Russell Pope. As the museum grew, however, the limitations of the…

Currently the only daily newspaper in Knoxville, the News-Sentinel began in December 1886 as the evening Sentinel published by John Travis Hearn, a native of Shelbyville, Kentucky. The first four-page edition of the Sentinel was printed on a steam-operated flatbed…

The Knoxville riot took place on August 30-31, 1919. Although many historians question whether it was a "race riot" in the classic sense, it bore many characteristics of that phenomenon. The arrest of Maurice Mayes, a sometimes deputy sheriff, touched…

The Knoxville International Energy Exposition was held from May through October 1982 on a 67-acre area a few blocks west of the city's central business district. The idea of a world's fair in Knoxville was first conceived by W. Stewart…

The eighteen-day siege of Knoxville from November 17 to December 4, 1863, stemmed from two interrelated causes. First, General Braxton Bragg, commander of the Army of Tennessee, desired to divert troops from the Federal army holding the city of Chattanooga.…

This Chattanooga-based hamburger chain was founded in 1932 by Rodolph B. Davenport Jr. and J. Glenn Sherrill. Loosely patterned after the successful midwestern White Castle hamburger chain which had begun in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, Krystal capitalized on the economic…

The infamous Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was organized in May or early June of 1866 in a law office in Pulaski by six bored Confederate veterans (the "immortal six"). The Ku Klux Klan was, in its inception, a social club…

In its broadest context, "labor" refers to a very diverse set of conditions: slave and free labor; craft and industrial labor; farm and factory labor; and blue, pink, and white collar labor. Because there are few theses, dissertations, or secondary…

The Ladies' Hermitage Association was organized in 1889 to honor President Andrew Jackson by preserving his home, the Hermitage. Mrs. Andrew Jackson III and Mary C. Dorris suggested a women's association similar to The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association after Dorris…

Located in the northwest corner of Tennessee, Lake County is bounded by Kentucky on the north, Reelfoot Lake and Obion County on the east, the Mississippi River on the west, and Dyer County on the south. The smallest county in…

On December 2, 1843, the Memphis Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church received a charter from the Tennessee General Assembly authorizing the establishment of a young women's preparatory school and college to be named the Memphis Conference Female Institute (MCFI).…

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…