Dee Gee Lester

Jay G. Cisco, distinguished journalist, historian, businessman, diplomat, and archaeologist, was born in New Orleans on April 25, 1844. After serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War, he traveled in Europe and worked briefly as a newspaperman. In…

Sara Ward Conley, noted Nashville artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was born on December 21, 1859, to Dr. William and Eliza Ward. Following an education at Nashville's Ward Seminary (a school for young women founded by…

In 1858 John O'Mahony established the Fenian Brotherhood of America to provide money, arms, and military leadership for an anticipated rising against England by the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood. An odd twist in this story of nineteenth-century Irish nationalism was the…

Located on Memphis's historic Beale Street and called the city's "best kept secret," this restored Greek Revival house opened to public tours in the mid-1990s. Completed in 1832 by George Wyatt, the house featured several architectural flourishes, including an escape…

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…

Archaeological evidence in Sumner County indicates occupation by Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian cultures in the deep past. Two easily accessible prehistoric mounds stand at Castalian Springs, where Native Americans for centuries came to hunt the game which gathered at…