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The short-lived Southern Citizen was a pro-slavery newspaper in the heart of antislavery East Tennessee; its editor, an Irish nationalist hero of 1848, worked in the midst of anti-immigrant Know Nothings. In October 1857 Knoxville mayor William Swan cofounded the…

Located in Memphis, the Southern College of Optometry has educated over six thousand optometrists in its sixty-nine years of existence. It is one of only seventeen schools of optometry in the United States and has contracts with several states to…

In 1884 two mechanics in Jackson established the Southern Engine and Boiler Works to build a line of small engines and boilers. In 1895 the mechanics sold their shop to local stockholders, who constructed a new complex on North Royal…

Under the leadership of E. J. Owens, Southern Potteries, Inc., began operations in Erwin in Unicoi County in 1916-17 using skilled labor brought from Ohio and local unskilled workers. Its product was known as Clinchfield ware, and the company's letterhead…

The first record Elvis Presley released in 1954 shows the inspired ways Tennesseans merged musical traditions into something new and exciting called rock music. The A side was "That's All Right," a blues song by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, and…

The Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio, often called the Southwest Territory, was created by an act of Congress on May 26, 1790. The State of North Carolina had ceded the lands and waterways encompassed by…

Soybeans have become one of the most important cash crops in post-World War II Tennessee, ranking as the third highest cash crop in the state in 1999. The first record of soybeans in the United States dates to 1804, but…

The Spanish Conspiracy of the mid-1780s arose in the aftermath of the American Revolution when the leaders of the Cumberland settlements, which were then still part of North Carolina, courted a possible relationship with the Spanish government in New Orleans.…

Tennesseans participated in virtually every aspect of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Commander Washburn Maynard (a Knoxville native) of the gunboat Nashville is credited with firing the first shot of the war on April 22. The same vessel was assigned…

Three miles east of Sparta along U.S. Highway 70 is the Sparta Rock House, built initially as a toll house and stage stop along a busy antebellum turnpike between Sparta and Crossville. It is considered a significant and rare artifact…

How Tennesseans talk expresses their regional identity and often draws comment by people from elsewhere. Whether they call it a "Tennessee twang" or an "East Tennessee brogue," Tennesseans and others often consider it distinctive. It is quite difficult, however, to…

Thomas S. Spencer is usually regarded as the first white settler in Middle Tennessee. On a long hunt to the area from 1776 to the spring of 1779, he staked out land, planted it, and built cabins on it, and…

The only Tennessee high school athlete to go on to win the Heisman Trophy as the nation's outstanding college football player, Steve Spurrier is best known today as the head football coach of the University of Florida, a fierce rival…

St. Andrew's-Sewanee School is the result of the 1981 merger of two older institutions, and it builds upon the heritage of three Episcopal schools founded on Monteagle Mountain in Franklin County. The junior department of the University of the South,…

Maury County's landmark St. John's Episcopal Church, constructed between 1839 and 1842, exemplifies rural simplification of the prevailing Gothic Revival architectural style used in Episcopal churches of the antebellum South. Five sons of the North Carolina planter William Polk, who…

The world's only institution devoted solely to the study and treatment of catastrophic childhood illnesses, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital was built on one man's promise. Then a struggling radio actor with seven dollars in his pocket, Danny Thomas offered…

This Nashville landmark is one of the first Catholic Church buildings constructed in Tennessee and served as the Catholic Cathedral for almost seventy years. The oldest extant church building in downtown Nashville, St. Mary's dates to 1844-47. Its architect was…

The oldest private school in Memphis is St. Mary's Episcopal School. It has operated continuously since its founding in 1847, and during most of its existence the school has been exclusively for girls. During the Civil War, Headmistress Mary Foote…

St. Michael's Catholic Church, incorporating the state's oldest Catholic church building, began as a small log meeting house near Cedar Hill in Robertson County. Four families (the Byrnes, Redmonds, Traughbers and Watsons) who settled near Turnersville between 1838 and 1840…

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church is one of Memphis’s most historic institutions. Tennessee’s Catholic Diocese in Nashville decided that another Catholic church should be established in Memphis because of the city’s population growth during and after the Civil War. The largest…