Event

For a short time in the antebellum period, many Tennessee farmers pursued what they thought would be a promising commercial opportunity in the production of silk. Fueling their optimism were discoveries in the 1830s that silkworms thrived on the native…

On February 1, 1960, four black freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered the Woolworth's store in downtown Greensboro, seated themselves at the store's lunch counter, and requested service. As they expected, they were…

In 1958, following the formation of the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) by the Reverend Kelly Miller Smith Sr. and others, African American leaders and students launched an attack on Jim Crow segregation. The NCLC utilized the concept of Christian…

An expedition led by Hernando de Soto conducted the earliest exploration of Tennessee by non-Native Americans in May, June, and July of 1540. The expedition of some seven hundred Spaniards and their slaves had landed at Tampa Bay the previous…

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…

Few issues have dominated an era of Tennessee politics like the debate over the state debt which raged for six years (1877-83) as a predominant political issue. Having first been incurred in support of antebellum railroad construction, the debt dramatically…

A short-lived attempt to create a new state in the trans-Appalachian settlement of present-day East Tennessee, the State of Franklin arose from the general unsettled state of national, regional, and local politics at the end of the Revolutionary War. Under…

By the last days of December 1862, the Civil War was more than halfway through its second year, and certainly its course had turned against the Confederacy. The fall of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, the loss of New Orleans,…

At 2:00 a.m. on April 27, 1865, the magnificent side-wheeler riverboat Sultana was struggling against the surging current of the Mississippi River eight miles north of Memphis. The weather was rainy and chilly, and the boat was grossly overloaded. Suddenly…

In the early twentieth century, temperance was the key issue in Tennessee politics. The roots of the temperance movement date to Jacksonian America, when temperance reform appeared in conjunction with capitalistic economic efforts. For the next eight decades temperance leaders…

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 inspired at least four or five thousand young Tennesseans to cross the country. Many of them, rejected for service in the Mexican War because of the overabundance of volunteers, saw this as…

The year 1996 marked Tennessee's bicentennial. In honor of the occasion, the general assembly created Tennessee 200, Inc., and charged it with developing bicentennial programs. Local and traveling programs were developed to bring the celebration to all areas of the…

Tennessee's first anti-narcotic law was largely the work of Dr. Lucius Polk Brown, Tennessee's food and drug commissioner. It went into effect on January 1, 1914, and reflected the moral reform atmosphere of the Progressive era. The law went further…

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition, held in Nashville in 1897 to celebrate Tennessee's one-hundredth anniversary of statehood, was one of the largest and grandest of a series of industrial expositions that became hallmarks of the New South era. Modeled in particular…

The Tennessee Civil War Veterans' Questionnaires form an extensive collection of documents housed in the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville and are a useful tool for the study of the state's nineteenth-century social conditions. The questionnaire's 1,650 respondents…

The Tennessee Supreme Court decided in 1993 that the system of financing public education in Tennessee violated the provisions of the Tennessee Constitution guaranteeing equal protection of the law to all citizens. The court held that the Tennessee General Assembly…

In 1959 African Americans in Fayette and Haywood Counties fought for the right to vote. The concern for voting emerged as a by-product of the absence of black jurors for the trial of Burton Dodson, an African American farmer in…

In mid-July 1925 much of the nation's attention was focused on the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where John T. Scopes was on trial for teaching about evolution. Four months earlier, the Tennessee General Assembly had overwhelmingly passed a bill…

As early as 1790, a number of thoroughbred stallions were brought into the Watauga and Holston settlements, and between 1790 and 1795, the Knoxville Register and Star Gazette advertised at least nine stallions as standing in what is now East…