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95 books about Tennessee
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95 books about Tennessee
200 Years Through 200 Stories
Tennessee Bicentennial Collection
Anne Klebenow
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930
Elites and Dilemmas
Bobby L. Lovett
University of Arkansas Press, 1999
Since its founding, Nashville has been a center of black urban culture in the Upper South. Blacks—slave and free—made up 20 percent of Fort Nashborough’s settlers in 1779. From these early years through the Civil War, a growing black community in Nashville, led by a small group of black elites, quietly built the foundations of a future society, developing schools, churches, and businesses. The Civil War brought new freedoms and challenges as the black population of Nashville increased and as black elites found themselves able—even obliged—to act more openly. To establish a more stable and prosperous African-American community, the elites found that they had to work within a system bound to the interests of whites. But the aims of this elite did not always coincide with those of the black community at large. By 1930, younger blacks, in particular, were moving towards protest and confrontation. As democratization and higher education spread, the lines distinguishing Nashville’s black elite became blurred.
Bobby L. Lovett presents a complex analysis of black experience in Nashville during the years between 1780 and 1930, exploring the impact of civil rights, education, politics, religion, business, and neighborhood development on a particular African-American community. This study of black Nashville examines lives lived within a web of shifting alliances and interests—the choices made, the difficulties overcome.
Fifteen years in the making, illustrated with maps and photographs, this work is the first detailed study of any of Tennessee’s major urban black communities. Lovett here collects, organizes, and interprets a large, rich body of data, making this material newly accessible to all interested in the black urban experience.
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Air Castle of the South
WSM and the Making of Music City
Craig Havighurst
University of Illinois Press, 2013
Started by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company in 1925, WSM became one of the most influential and exceptional radio stations in the history of broadcasting and country music. WSM gave Nashville the moniker “Music City USA” as well as a rich tradition of music, news, and broad-based entertainment. With the rise of country music broadcasting and recording between the 1920s and ‘50s, WSM, Nashville, and country music became inseparable, stemming from WSM’s launch of the Grand Ole Opry, popular daily shows like Noontime Neighbors, and early morning artist-driven shows such as Hank Williams on Mother’s Best Flour.
Sparked by public outcry following a proposal to pull country music and the Opry from WSM-AM in 2002, Craig Havighurst scoured new and existing sources to document the station’s profound effect on the character and self-image of Nashville. Introducing the reader to colorful artists and businessmen from the station’s history, including Owen Bradley, Minnie Pearl, Jim Denny, Edwin Craig, and Dinah Shore, the volume invites the reader to reflect on the status of Nashville, radio, and country music in American culture.
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The Appalachian Frontier
America'S First Surge Westward
John Anthony Caruso
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
John Anthony Caruso’s The Appalachian Frontier, first published in 1959, captures the drama and sweep of a nation at the beginning of its westward expansion. Bringing to life the region’s history from its earliest seventeenth-century scouting parties to the admission of Tennessee to the Union in 1796, Caruso describes the exchange of ideas, values, and cultural traits that marked Appalachia as a unique frontier.
Looking at the rich and mountainous land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, The Appalachian Frontier follows the story of the Long Hunters in Kentucky; the struggles of the Regulators in North Carolina; the founding of the Watauga, Transylvania, Franklin, and Cumberland settlements; the siege of Boonesboro; and the patterns and challenges of frontier life. While narrating the gripping stories of such figures as Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and Chief Logan, Caruso combines social, political, and economic history into a comprehensive overview of the early mountain South.
In his new introduction, John C. Inscoe examines how this work exemplified the so-called consensus school of history that arose in the United States during the cold war. Unabashedly celebratory in his analysis of American nation building, Caruso shows how the development of Appalachia fit into the grander scheme of the evolution of the country. While there is much in The Appalachian Frontier that contemporary historians would regard as one-sided and romanticized, Inscoe points out that “those of us immersed so deeply in the study of the region and its people sometimes tend to forget that the white settlement of the mountain south in the eighteenth century was not merely the chronological foundation of the Appalachian experience. As Caruso so vividly demonstrates, it is also represented a vital—even defining—stage in the American progression across the continent.”
The Author: John Anthony Caruso was a professor of history at West Virginia University. He died in 1997.
John C. Inscoe is professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is editor of Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation and author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina.
Looking at the rich and mountainous land between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, The Appalachian Frontier follows the story of the Long Hunters in Kentucky; the struggles of the Regulators in North Carolina; the founding of the Watauga, Transylvania, Franklin, and Cumberland settlements; the siege of Boonesboro; and the patterns and challenges of frontier life. While narrating the gripping stories of such figures as Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and Chief Logan, Caruso combines social, political, and economic history into a comprehensive overview of the early mountain South.
In his new introduction, John C. Inscoe examines how this work exemplified the so-called consensus school of history that arose in the United States during the cold war. Unabashedly celebratory in his analysis of American nation building, Caruso shows how the development of Appalachia fit into the grander scheme of the evolution of the country. While there is much in The Appalachian Frontier that contemporary historians would regard as one-sided and romanticized, Inscoe points out that “those of us immersed so deeply in the study of the region and its people sometimes tend to forget that the white settlement of the mountain south in the eighteenth century was not merely the chronological foundation of the Appalachian experience. As Caruso so vividly demonstrates, it is also represented a vital—even defining—stage in the American progression across the continent.”
The Author: John Anthony Caruso was a professor of history at West Virginia University. He died in 1997.
John C. Inscoe is professor of history at the University of Georgia. He is editor of Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation and author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina.
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Archaeology at Shiloh Indian Mounds, 1899-1999
Paul D. Welch
University of Alabama Press, 2006
100 years of archaeological excavations at an important American landmark.
The Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site, a National Historic Landmark, is a late prehistoric community within the boundaries of the Shiloh National Military Park on the banks of the Tennessee River, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought in April 1862. Dating between AD 1000 and 1450, the archaeological site includes at least eight mounds and more than 100 houses. It is unique in that the land has never been plowed, so visitors can walk around the area and find the collapsed remains of 800-year-old houses and the 900-meter-long palisade with bastions that protected the village in prehistoric times. Although its location within a National Park boundary has protected the area from the recent ravages of man, river bank erosion began to undermine the site in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, Paul Welch began a four-year investigation culminating in a comprehensive report to the National Park Service on the Shiloh Indian Mounds.
The Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site, a National Historic Landmark, is a late prehistoric community within the boundaries of the Shiloh National Military Park on the banks of the Tennessee River, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought in April 1862. Dating between AD 1000 and 1450, the archaeological site includes at least eight mounds and more than 100 houses. It is unique in that the land has never been plowed, so visitors can walk around the area and find the collapsed remains of 800-year-old houses and the 900-meter-long palisade with bastions that protected the village in prehistoric times. Although its location within a National Park boundary has protected the area from the recent ravages of man, river bank erosion began to undermine the site in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, Paul Welch began a four-year investigation culminating in a comprehensive report to the National Park Service on the Shiloh Indian Mounds.
These published findings confirm that the Shiloh site was one of at least fourteen Mississippian mound sites located within a 50 km area and that Shiloh was abandoned in approximately AD 1450. It also establishes other parameters for the Shiloh archaeological phase. This current volume is intended to make information about the first 100 years of excavations at the Shiloh site available to the archaeological community.
Paul D. Welch is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illionois University, Carbondale, and is the author of Moundville's Economy.
Paul D. Welch is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illionois University, Carbondale, and is the author of Moundville's Economy.
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At Work in the Atomic City
A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Russell B. Olwell
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
Founded during World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a vital link in the U.S. military’s atomic bomb assembly line—the site where scientists worked at a breakneck pace to turn tons of uranium into a few grams of the artificial element plutonium. To construct and operate the plants needed for this effort, thousands of workers, both skilled and unskilled, converged on the “city behind a fence” tucked between two ridges of sparsely populated farmland in the Tennessee hills.
At Work in the Atomic City explores the world of those workers and their efforts to form unions, create a community, and gain political rights over their city. It follows them from their arrival at Oak Ridge, to the places where they lived, and to their experiences in a dangerous and secretive workplace. Lured by promises of housing, plentiful work, and schooling for their children, they were often exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity, harmful chemicals, and other hazards. Although scientists and doctors intended to protect workers, the pressure to produce materials for the bomb often overrode safety considerations. After the war, as the military sought to reduce services and jobs in Oak Ridge, workers organized unions at two plants to demand higher wages and job security. However, the new Taft-Hartley Act limited defense workers’ ability to strike and thus curbed union influence.
The book examines the ongoing debates over workers’ rights at Oak Ridge—notably the controversy surrounding the new federal program intended to compensate workers and their families for injuries sustained on the job. Because of faulty record keeping at the facilities and confusion over exposure levels, many have been denied payment to this day.
Drawing on extensive research into oral history collections, transcripts of government proceedings, and other primary sources, At Work in the Atomic City is the first detailed account of the workers who built and labored in the facilities that helped ensure the success of the Manhattan Project—a story known, heretofore, only in broad outline.
At Work in the Atomic City explores the world of those workers and their efforts to form unions, create a community, and gain political rights over their city. It follows them from their arrival at Oak Ridge, to the places where they lived, and to their experiences in a dangerous and secretive workplace. Lured by promises of housing, plentiful work, and schooling for their children, they were often exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity, harmful chemicals, and other hazards. Although scientists and doctors intended to protect workers, the pressure to produce materials for the bomb often overrode safety considerations. After the war, as the military sought to reduce services and jobs in Oak Ridge, workers organized unions at two plants to demand higher wages and job security. However, the new Taft-Hartley Act limited defense workers’ ability to strike and thus curbed union influence.
The book examines the ongoing debates over workers’ rights at Oak Ridge—notably the controversy surrounding the new federal program intended to compensate workers and their families for injuries sustained on the job. Because of faulty record keeping at the facilities and confusion over exposure levels, many have been denied payment to this day.
Drawing on extensive research into oral history collections, transcripts of government proceedings, and other primary sources, At Work in the Atomic City is the first detailed account of the workers who built and labored in the facilities that helped ensure the success of the Manhattan Project—a story known, heretofore, only in broad outline.
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Athens of the New South
College Life and the Making of Modern Nashville
Mary Ellen Pethel
University of Tennessee Press, 2017
In 2013, the New York Times identified Nashville as America’s “it” city—a leading hub of music, culture, technology, food, and business. But long before, the Tennessee capital was known as the “Athens of the South,” as a reflection of the city’s reputation for and investment in its institutions of higher education, which especially blossomed after the end of the Civil War and through the New South Era from 1865 to 1930.
This wide-ranging book chronicles the founding and growth of Nashville’s institutions of higher education and their impressive impact on the city, region, and nation at large. Local colleges and universities also heavily influenced Nashville’s brand of modernity as evidenced by the construction of a Parthenon replica, the centerpiece of the 1897 Centennial Exposition. By the turn of the twentieth century, Vanderbilt University had become one of the country’s premier private schools, while nearby Peabody College was a leading teacher-training institution. Nashville also became known as a center for the education of African Americans. Fisk University joined the ranks of the nation’s most prestigious black liberal-arts universities, while Meharry Medical College emerged as one of the country’s few training centers for African American medical professionals. Following the agricultural-industrial model, Tennessee A&I became the state’s first black public college. Meanwhile, various other schools— Ward-Belmont, a junior college for women; David Lipscomb College, the instructional arm of the Church of Christ; and Roger Williams University, which trained black men and women as teachers and preachers—made important contributions to the higher educational landscape. In sum, Nashville was distinguished not only by the quantity of its schools but by their quality.
Linking these institutions to the progressive and educational reforms of the era, Mary Ellen Pethel also explores their impact in shaping Nashville’s expansion, on changing gender roles, and on leisure activity in the city, which included the rise and popularity of collegiate sports. In her conclusion, she shows that Nashville’s present-day reputation as a dynamic place to live, learn, and work is due in no small part to the role that higher education continues to play in the city’s growth and development.
MARY ELLEN PETHEL is the archivist and a member of the Social Science Department at Harpeth Hall School in Nashville. At Belmont University, also in Nashville, Dr. Pethel is a Global Leadership Studies Fellow and teaches in the Honors Department.
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Backcountry Makers
An Artisan History of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee
Betsy K. White
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
This new book brings to life the material-culture heritage of southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. In Backcountry Makers, Betsy K. White expands on her previous study of the region’s rich decorative arts legacy, Great Road Style, to offer a closer look at the individual artisans responsible for the diverse works that constitute that legacy.
Beautifully illustrated with some 230 photographs, most of them in color, this volume includes biographical sketches of seventy-five makers—potters, weavers, spinners, quilters, embroiderers, cabinetmakers, metalsmiths, clocksmiths, gunsmiths, and artists—who worked in the region from the earliest eighteenth-century settlement days to the late twentieth century. The entry for each artisan is accompanied by one or more images of a signed or marked work, or, in a number of instances, an unmarked work with certain provenance.
These vignettes offer a fascinating glimpse of the people behind the various pieces, describing their background, family life, and where they learned their trade. Using census records and other documentary evidence, White has traced the earliest of these artisans from their origins in such places as Europe and Philadelphia down through the Great Valley of Virginia to their ultimate destinations in southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. Along with the photos displaying the products of their craftsmanship, the book also includes a number of evocative images of the artists and their homes and towns, thus giving the reader a fuller sense of the region where these gifted people lived and worked.
One of the few studies to addresses handmade objects in this locale—and one of the even fewer works to focus on the artisans themselves— Backcountry Makers will be of great value not only to scholars of material culture and the arts in Appalachia but also to those who collect regional antiques and crafts and want to know more about the individuals who made them.
Betsy K. White is the author of Great Road Style: The Decorative Arts Legacy of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee. Until her retirement in 2008, she was director of the William King Regional Arts Center (now William King Museum) in Abingdon, Virginia.
Beautifully illustrated with some 230 photographs, most of them in color, this volume includes biographical sketches of seventy-five makers—potters, weavers, spinners, quilters, embroiderers, cabinetmakers, metalsmiths, clocksmiths, gunsmiths, and artists—who worked in the region from the earliest eighteenth-century settlement days to the late twentieth century. The entry for each artisan is accompanied by one or more images of a signed or marked work, or, in a number of instances, an unmarked work with certain provenance.
These vignettes offer a fascinating glimpse of the people behind the various pieces, describing their background, family life, and where they learned their trade. Using census records and other documentary evidence, White has traced the earliest of these artisans from their origins in such places as Europe and Philadelphia down through the Great Valley of Virginia to their ultimate destinations in southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee. Along with the photos displaying the products of their craftsmanship, the book also includes a number of evocative images of the artists and their homes and towns, thus giving the reader a fuller sense of the region where these gifted people lived and worked.
One of the few studies to addresses handmade objects in this locale—and one of the even fewer works to focus on the artisans themselves— Backcountry Makers will be of great value not only to scholars of material culture and the arts in Appalachia but also to those who collect regional antiques and crafts and want to know more about the individuals who made them.
Betsy K. White is the author of Great Road Style: The Decorative Arts Legacy of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee. Until her retirement in 2008, she was director of the William King Regional Arts Center (now William King Museum) in Abingdon, Virginia.
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Before the Volunteer State
New Thoughts on Early Tennessee, 1540–1800
Kristofer Ray
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Most general studies of Tennessee history begin with the arrival of Anglo-American settlers in the 1760s, with only a brief overview of the state’s “prehistory.” This welcome volume rethinks this narrative by placing Tennessee’s origins firmly in the seventeenth century. In ten thoughtful essays, scholars of trans-Appalachian and early American history address a number of issues that have been touched on only fleetingly within Tennessee historiography, including the dynamic balance of Native American concerns and European imperial interests, the complexity of Revolutionary-era struggles, and the associated challenges of jurisdiction, dominion, and identity formation. Collectively, the volume situates Tennessee more firmly within the context of regional, North American, and Atlantic World developments.
The essays are divided into two parts—the first focusing on the establishment and geopolitical complexities of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century life in and around the Tennessee River, and the second exploring the effects of the American Revolution in this geopolitical space. Topics in Part One include Indian life in the late Mississippian era, how contact with Europeans forced a process of migration and change, European understanding of Cherokee strength, and the importance of the Creeks, Cherokees, and Shawnees to early Tennessee history. Part Two offers articles about the confusing milieu into which the region was thrown during the Revolution, the central role of kinship networks for both Indians and whites, and the difficulties of identity formation as Euro-Americans expanded their presence on the Tennessee frontier. The work concludes by addressing the issue of myth and memory and how early Tennessee history was overtaken by nineteenth-century historical narratives that continue to serve as the foundation for understanding the state.
Taken together, these essays provide a gateway through which to reimagine early Tennessee history—a reimagining that demonstrates the significance of the Volunteer State within broader trends in early modern, southern, trans-Appalachian, and Atlantic World history.
Kristofer Ray is senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly and an associate professor of early American history at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. He is the author of Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier.
The essays are divided into two parts—the first focusing on the establishment and geopolitical complexities of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century life in and around the Tennessee River, and the second exploring the effects of the American Revolution in this geopolitical space. Topics in Part One include Indian life in the late Mississippian era, how contact with Europeans forced a process of migration and change, European understanding of Cherokee strength, and the importance of the Creeks, Cherokees, and Shawnees to early Tennessee history. Part Two offers articles about the confusing milieu into which the region was thrown during the Revolution, the central role of kinship networks for both Indians and whites, and the difficulties of identity formation as Euro-Americans expanded their presence on the Tennessee frontier. The work concludes by addressing the issue of myth and memory and how early Tennessee history was overtaken by nineteenth-century historical narratives that continue to serve as the foundation for understanding the state.
Taken together, these essays provide a gateway through which to reimagine early Tennessee history—a reimagining that demonstrates the significance of the Volunteer State within broader trends in early modern, southern, trans-Appalachian, and Atlantic World history.
Kristofer Ray is senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly and an associate professor of early American history at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee. He is the author of Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier.
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Black Tennesseans, 1900-1930
Lester C. Lamon
University of Tennessee Press, 1977
Blacks In Tennessee 1791-1970
Tennessee Three Star Series
Lester C. Lamon
University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga
Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South
Michelle R. Scott
University of Illinois Press, 2007
As one of the first African American vocalists to be recorded, Bessie Smith is a prominent figure in American popular culture and African American history. Michelle R. Scott uses Smith's life as a lens to investigate broad issues in history, including industrialization, Southern rural to urban migration, black community development in the post-emancipation era, and black working-class gender conventions.
Arguing that the rise of blues culture and the success of female blues artists like Bessie Smith are connected to the rapid migration and industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Scott focuses her analysis on Chattanooga, Tennessee, the large industrial and transportation center where Smith was born. This study explores how the expansion of the Southern railroads and the development of iron foundries, steel mills, and sawmills created vast employment opportunities in the postbellum era. Chronicling the growth and development of the African American Chattanooga community, Scott examines the Smith family's migration to Chattanooga and the popular music of black Chattanooga during the first decade of the twentieth century, and culminates by delving into Smith's early years on the vaudeville circuit.
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The Bone Hunters
The Discovery Of Miocene Fossils In Gray, Tennessee
Harry L. Moore
University of Tennessee Press, 2004
In the spring and summer of 2000, geologists working for the Tennessee Department of Transportation made an extraordinary find as they examined soil at a routine road construction project: the digging at Gray, Tennessee, had uncovered a fossil site containing bones that would turn out to be at least five million years old. Harry Moore and his colleagues, along with researchers from the state and the University of Tennessee, were stunned as they unearthed the fossilized remains of tapirs, elephants, rhinoceroses, alligators, and other long-dead animals. What was at first thought to be an Ice Age site ten to twenty thousand years old proved to be much, much older.
The Bone Hunters recounts the fascinating details of a remarkable chance discovery. In his engaging firsthand account, Moore writes of the people behind the excavation of the site and how their efforts helped save valuable artifacts for ongoing study. Numerous photographs capture the excellent condition of fossils at Gray. Moore also describes the contours of what the ancient landscape may have looked like and details the governmental action that ultimately preserved this Tennessee treasure.
Harry Moore manages the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s Geotechnial Engineering office in Knoxville. His previous books are A Roadside Guide to the Geology of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, A Geologic Trip Across Tennessee by Interstate 40, and Discovering October Roads: Fall Colors and Geology in Rural East Tennessee (co-written with Fred Brown).
The Bone Hunters recounts the fascinating details of a remarkable chance discovery. In his engaging firsthand account, Moore writes of the people behind the excavation of the site and how their efforts helped save valuable artifacts for ongoing study. Numerous photographs capture the excellent condition of fossils at Gray. Moore also describes the contours of what the ancient landscape may have looked like and details the governmental action that ultimately preserved this Tennessee treasure.
Harry Moore manages the Tennessee Department of Transportation’s Geotechnial Engineering office in Knoxville. His previous books are A Roadside Guide to the Geology of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, A Geologic Trip Across Tennessee by Interstate 40, and Discovering October Roads: Fall Colors and Geology in Rural East Tennessee (co-written with Fred Brown).
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Burden Of Busing
Politics Of Desegregation In Nashville, Tn
Richard A. Pride
University of Tennessee Press, 1985
The Chickamauga Campaign
Edited by Steven E. Woodworth
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
From mid-August to mid-September 1863, Union major general William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland maneuvered from Tennessee to north Georgia in a bid to rout Confederate general Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee and blaze the way for further Union advances. Meanwhile, Confederate reinforcements bolstered the numbers of the Army of Tennessee, and by the time the two armies met at the Battle of Chickamauga, in northern Georgia, the Confederates had gained numerical superiority.
Although the Confederacy won its only major victory west of the Appalachians, it failed to achieve the truly decisive results many high-ranking Confederates expected. In The Chickamauga Campaign,Steven E. Woodworth assembles eight thought-provoking new essays from an impressive group of authors to offer new insight into the complex reasons for this substantial, yet ultimately barren, Confederate victory.
This broad collection covers every angle of the campaign, from its prelude to its denouement, from the points of view of key players of all ranks on both sides. In addition to analyzing the actions taken by Union leaders Thomas L. Crittenden, Alexander McCook, and James S. Negley, and Confederate commanders Braxton Bragg, Patrick Cleburne, Daniel Harvey Hill, Thomas C. Hindman, James Longstreet, and Alexander P. Stewart, the book probes the campaign’s impact on morale in the North and South, and concludes with an essay on the campaign’s place in Civil War memory. The final essay pays particular attention to Union veteran Henry Van Ness Boynton, the founder and developer of Chickamauga and Chattanooga State Military Park, whose achievements helped shape how the campaign would be remembered.
This second volume in the Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland seriesprovides a profound understanding of the campaign’s details as well as its significance to Civil War history.
Contributors:
John R. Lundberg
Alexander Mendoza
David Powell
Ethan S. Rafuse
William G. Robertson
Timothy B. Smith
Lee White
Steven E. Woodworth
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Circling Windrock Mountain
Two Hundred Years Appalachia
Augusta Grove Bell
University of Tennessee Press, 1999
Around 1800, a Revolutionary War veteran named Micajah Frost came to the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee and cleared a portion of virgin forest in what is now Anderson County. Others followed, and eventually this small area was dotted with settlers. In the years since, those settlers and their descendants witnessed the strife of the Civil War, the rise of the coal-mining and logging industries, the coming of the railroad, and countless smaller upheavals. Drawn largely from the memories of long-time residents, this delightful book revisits two hundred years of history in the communities surrounding what was locally called Windrock Mountain.
The stories Augusta Bell recounts take us from Oliver Springs—which had its origins in the grist mill Moses Winters built in 1799 and which later became a “boom town” with a fashionable resort hotel—to places like New River Valley, Graves Gap, and Duncan Flats. She depicts the everyday lives of the mountain people as well as the extraordinary events that sometimes shattered those lives—such as the Coal Creek War of 1891–93, in which miners squared off against state militia, and the two mine explosions that came a few years later, sealing up 268 men deep inside the mountain. Bell also tells of happier times, as when the famous Windrock Mine opened above Oliver Springs in 1909.
Tapping a rich lode of folklore and oral tradition, along with other historical sources, Circling Windrock Mountain offers a view of Appalachian life that defies old stereotypes. Far from being static, the communities described here saw an amazing variety of changes to which they adapted with resilience and ingenuity.
The Author: Augusta Grove Bell, a writer who now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, has been a newspaper reporter and teacher. From 1958 to 1970, she lived in Anderson County, Tennessee, where she worked for the Oak Ridger and wrote feature stories that form much of the basis for this book.
The stories Augusta Bell recounts take us from Oliver Springs—which had its origins in the grist mill Moses Winters built in 1799 and which later became a “boom town” with a fashionable resort hotel—to places like New River Valley, Graves Gap, and Duncan Flats. She depicts the everyday lives of the mountain people as well as the extraordinary events that sometimes shattered those lives—such as the Coal Creek War of 1891–93, in which miners squared off against state militia, and the two mine explosions that came a few years later, sealing up 268 men deep inside the mountain. Bell also tells of happier times, as when the famous Windrock Mine opened above Oliver Springs in 1909.
Tapping a rich lode of folklore and oral tradition, along with other historical sources, Circling Windrock Mountain offers a view of Appalachian life that defies old stereotypes. Far from being static, the communities described here saw an amazing variety of changes to which they adapted with resilience and ingenuity.
The Author: Augusta Grove Bell, a writer who now lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, has been a newspaper reporter and teacher. From 1958 to 1970, she lived in Anderson County, Tennessee, where she worked for the Oak Ridger and wrote feature stories that form much of the basis for this book.
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City Behind Fence
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942-1946
Charles W. Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created by the U.S. government during World War II to aid in the construction of the first atomic bomb. Drawing on oral history and previously classified material, this book portrays the patterns of daily life in this unique setting.
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The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee
A Narrative History
Bobby L. Lovett
University of Tennessee Press, 2005
From legal battles to sit-ins to freedom rides to marches, activists in the United States rose up against racial discrimination in the civil rights movement. While many books have focused on the national campaign and prominent leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, this is the first book to examine the civil rights movement in the state of Tennessee.Bobby L. Lovett proposes that African Americans have always had a civil rights movement in Tennessee, even during slavery. He identifies three phases of the movement in the state—1864 to 1880, 1881 to 1934, and 1935 to the present—and focuses on the last period. Lovett explores early Jim Crow Tennessee, public school desegregation since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, sit-in and public desegregation activities, politics and civil rights, and the desegregation of higher education. This well-researched book draws on special collections from libraries across the state, personal papers, manuscript collections, conversations, observations, books, scholarly articles, and newspapers. Lovett covers the entire state, but concentrates on the four major cities: Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville. There are short descriptions of local interest to bring the movement alive, as well as sketches of main players, federal judges, and more than three dozen court cases that have affected race and civil rights in Tennessee.African American and white leaders in the fight for equality in Tennessee are revealed, and Lovett relates the movement with African Americans’ pursuit of inclusion in society nationally. Tennesseans who engaged in the struggle included prominent African American figures such as civil rights attorney Avon Williams of Nashville and NAACP activist Maxine Smith of Memphis. This book fills a gap in the historical record of the civil rights movement and is an important addition to studies of the movement both in Tennessee and in the nation.Bobby L. Lovett is a professor of history at Tennessee State University. He is the author of The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780–1930: Elites and Dilemmas and a contributor to The Southern Elite and Social Change: Essays in Honor of Willard B. Gatewood, Jr.
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Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show
A New Edition Introduced and Annotated by Philip Leigh
Sam Watkins
Westholme Publishing, 2013
“Company H,” the Classic Civil War Memoir in a New Edition, Completely Annotated for the First Time and Illustrated with Twenty-Four Maps
Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show is perhaps the finest memoir of an ordinary Confederate soldier. According to Margaret Mitchell, “a better book there never was.” Sam Watkins served in Company H of the First Tennessee Infantry for the duration of the Civil War. Remarkably, he survived some of the most intense battles of the war, including Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Franklin. He was one of only seven of the original members of Company H when it surrendered in April 1865. Watkins’s memoir was written in the winter of 1882–83. The humor and depth of writing at times rises to a level resembling Mark Twain; thus, twenty-first-century readers can still discover the everlasting treasures of Private Sam Watkins’s story just as it was. It is this reason that excerpts were featured frequently in Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War. However, since most of Sam’s original readers—or some of their family members—actually lived through the Civil War, much of the context for the narrative was common knowledge. But what was once received history has gradually disappeared, and presently only specialists can fully understand and appreciate Sam’s tale.
The chief aim for this new annotated edition of Co. Aytch—the first of its kind—is to amplify the experience for today’s readers by providing the missing context. Over 240 annotations clarify the situational backgrounds, personalities, and terminology that might not be familiar to most readers. The annotations also identify and explain errors mostly resulting from Sam’s occasionally faulty memory or limited perspective. Similarly, twentyfour battlefield and war theater maps enable readers to track Sam’s combat participation as well as his journeys while marching with the army. Finally fifteen photographs and prints illustrate some of the battles, people, towns, buildings, tools of war, and ruins that Sam witnessed. As someone once cleverly observed, “It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.” If nothing else, Sam’s memoir is a foot soldier’s view of the resulting horrors, heroics, and healing humor when war planning routinely goes awry.
Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show is perhaps the finest memoir of an ordinary Confederate soldier. According to Margaret Mitchell, “a better book there never was.” Sam Watkins served in Company H of the First Tennessee Infantry for the duration of the Civil War. Remarkably, he survived some of the most intense battles of the war, including Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Franklin. He was one of only seven of the original members of Company H when it surrendered in April 1865. Watkins’s memoir was written in the winter of 1882–83. The humor and depth of writing at times rises to a level resembling Mark Twain; thus, twenty-first-century readers can still discover the everlasting treasures of Private Sam Watkins’s story just as it was. It is this reason that excerpts were featured frequently in Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War. However, since most of Sam’s original readers—or some of their family members—actually lived through the Civil War, much of the context for the narrative was common knowledge. But what was once received history has gradually disappeared, and presently only specialists can fully understand and appreciate Sam’s tale.
The chief aim for this new annotated edition of Co. Aytch—the first of its kind—is to amplify the experience for today’s readers by providing the missing context. Over 240 annotations clarify the situational backgrounds, personalities, and terminology that might not be familiar to most readers. The annotations also identify and explain errors mostly resulting from Sam’s occasionally faulty memory or limited perspective. Similarly, twentyfour battlefield and war theater maps enable readers to track Sam’s combat participation as well as his journeys while marching with the army. Finally fifteen photographs and prints illustrate some of the battles, people, towns, buildings, tools of war, and ruins that Sam witnessed. As someone once cleverly observed, “It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.” If nothing else, Sam’s memoir is a foot soldier’s view of the resulting horrors, heroics, and healing humor when war planning routinely goes awry.
[more]
Cumberland Blood
Champ Ferguson's Civil War
Thomas D. Mays
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008
By the end of the Civil War, Champ Ferguson had become a notorious criminal whose likeness covered the front pages of Harper’ s Weekly, Leslie’ s Illustrated, and other newspapers across the country. His crime? Using the war as an excuse to steal, plunder, and murder Union civilians and soldiers.
Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson’ s Civil War offers insights into Ferguson's lawless brutality and a lesser-known aspect of the Civil War, the bitter guerrilla conflict in the Appalachian highlands, extending from the Carolinas through Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. This compelling volume delves into the violent story of Champ Ferguson, who acted independently of the Confederate army in a personal war that eventually garnered the censure of Confederate officials.
Author Thomas D. Mays traces Ferguson's life in the Cumberland highlands of southern Kentucky, where— even before the Civil War began— he had a reputation as a vicious killer.
Ferguson, a rising slave owner, sided with the Confederacy while many of his neighbors and family members took up arms for the Union. For Ferguson and others in the highlands, the war would not be decided on the distant fields of Shiloh or Gettysburg: it would be local— and personal.
Cumberland Blood describes how Unionists drove Ferguson from his home in Kentucky into Tennessee, where he banded together with other like-minded Southerners to drive the Unionists from the region. Northern sympathizers responded, and a full-scale guerrilla war erupted along the border in 1862. Mays notes that Ferguson's status in the army was never clear, and he skillfully details how raiders picked up Ferguson's gang to work as guides and scouts. In 1864, Ferguson and his gang were incorporated into the Confederate army, but the rogue soldier continued operating as an outlaw, murdering captured Union prisoners after the Battle of Saltville, Virginia.
Cumberland Blood, enhanced by twenty-one illustrations, is an illuminating assessment of one of the Civil War's most ruthless men.
Ferguson's arrest, trial, and execution after the war captured the attention of the nation in
1865, but his story has been largely forgotten. Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson's Civil War returns the story of Ferguson's private civil war to its place in history.
Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson’ s Civil War offers insights into Ferguson's lawless brutality and a lesser-known aspect of the Civil War, the bitter guerrilla conflict in the Appalachian highlands, extending from the Carolinas through Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. This compelling volume delves into the violent story of Champ Ferguson, who acted independently of the Confederate army in a personal war that eventually garnered the censure of Confederate officials.
Author Thomas D. Mays traces Ferguson's life in the Cumberland highlands of southern Kentucky, where— even before the Civil War began— he had a reputation as a vicious killer.
Ferguson, a rising slave owner, sided with the Confederacy while many of his neighbors and family members took up arms for the Union. For Ferguson and others in the highlands, the war would not be decided on the distant fields of Shiloh or Gettysburg: it would be local— and personal.
Cumberland Blood describes how Unionists drove Ferguson from his home in Kentucky into Tennessee, where he banded together with other like-minded Southerners to drive the Unionists from the region. Northern sympathizers responded, and a full-scale guerrilla war erupted along the border in 1862. Mays notes that Ferguson's status in the army was never clear, and he skillfully details how raiders picked up Ferguson's gang to work as guides and scouts. In 1864, Ferguson and his gang were incorporated into the Confederate army, but the rogue soldier continued operating as an outlaw, murdering captured Union prisoners after the Battle of Saltville, Virginia.
Cumberland Blood, enhanced by twenty-one illustrations, is an illuminating assessment of one of the Civil War's most ruthless men.
Ferguson's arrest, trial, and execution after the war captured the attention of the nation in
1865, but his story has been largely forgotten. Cumberland Blood: Champ Ferguson's Civil War returns the story of Ferguson's private civil war to its place in history.
[more]
Dewey and Elvis
The Life and Times of a Rock 'n' Roll Deejay
Louis Cantor
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Beginning in 1949, while Elvis Presley and Sun Records were still virtually unknown--and two full years before Alan Freed famously "discovered" rock 'n' roll--Dewey Phillips brought rock 'n' roll to the Memphis airwaves by playing Howlin' Wolf, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters on his nightly radio show Red, Hot and Blue. The mid-South's most popular white deejay, "Daddy-O-Dewey" is part of rock 'n' roll history for being the first major disc jockey to play Elvis Presley (and subsequently to conduct the first live, on-air interview with Elvis). This book illustrates Phillips's role in turning a huge white audience on to previously forbidden race music. His zeal for rhythm and blues legitimized the sound and set the stage for both Elvis's subsequent success and the rock 'n' roll revolution of the 1950s. Using personal interviews, documentary sources, and the oral history collections at the Center for Southern Folklore and the University of Memphis, Louis Cantor presents a very personal view of the disc jockey while arguing for his place as an essential part of rock 'n' roll history.
[more]
The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams
A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890
Minoa D. Uffelman
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
In 1863, while living in Clarksville, Tennessee, Martha Ann Haskins, known to friends
and family as Nannie, began a diary. The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern
Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890 provides valuable insights into
the conditions in occupied Middle Tennessee. A young, elite Confederate sympathizer,
Nannie was on the cusp of adulthood with the expectation of becoming a mistress in
a slaveholding society. The war ended this prospect, and her life was forever changed.
Though this is the first time the diaries have been published in full, they are well known
among Civil War scholars, and a voice-over from the wartime diary was used repeatedly
in Ken Burns’s famous PBS program The Civil War.
Sixteen-year-old Nannie had to come to terms with Union occupation very early in
the war. Amid school assignments, young friendship, social events, worries about her
marital prospects, and tension with her mother, Nannie’s entries also mixed information
about battles, neighbors wounded in combat, U.S. Colored troops, and lawlessness in the
surrounding countryside. Providing rare detail about daily life in an occupied city, Nannie’s
diary poignantly recounts how she and those around her continued to fight long after
the war was over—not in battles, but to maintain their lives in a war-torn community.
Though numerous women’s Civil War diaries exist, Nannie’s is unique in that she also
recounts her postwar life and the unexpected financial struggles she and her family experienced
in the post-Reconstruction South. Nannie’s diary may record only one woman’s
experience, but she represents a generation of young women born into a society based
on slavery but who faced mature adulthood in an entirely new world of decreasing farm
values, increasing industrialization, and young women entering the workforce. Civil War
scholars and students alike will learn much from this firsthand account of coming-of-age
during the Civil War.
Minoa D. Uffelman is an associate professor of history at Austin Peay State University.
Ellen Kanervo is professor emerita of communications at Austin Peay State University.
Phyllis Smith is retired from the U.S. Army and currently teaches high school science in
Montgomery County, Tennessee. Eleanor Williams is the Montgomery County, Tennessee,
historian.
and family as Nannie, began a diary. The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern
Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863–1890 provides valuable insights into
the conditions in occupied Middle Tennessee. A young, elite Confederate sympathizer,
Nannie was on the cusp of adulthood with the expectation of becoming a mistress in
a slaveholding society. The war ended this prospect, and her life was forever changed.
Though this is the first time the diaries have been published in full, they are well known
among Civil War scholars, and a voice-over from the wartime diary was used repeatedly
in Ken Burns’s famous PBS program The Civil War.
Sixteen-year-old Nannie had to come to terms with Union occupation very early in
the war. Amid school assignments, young friendship, social events, worries about her
marital prospects, and tension with her mother, Nannie’s entries also mixed information
about battles, neighbors wounded in combat, U.S. Colored troops, and lawlessness in the
surrounding countryside. Providing rare detail about daily life in an occupied city, Nannie’s
diary poignantly recounts how she and those around her continued to fight long after
the war was over—not in battles, but to maintain their lives in a war-torn community.
Though numerous women’s Civil War diaries exist, Nannie’s is unique in that she also
recounts her postwar life and the unexpected financial struggles she and her family experienced
in the post-Reconstruction South. Nannie’s diary may record only one woman’s
experience, but she represents a generation of young women born into a society based
on slavery but who faced mature adulthood in an entirely new world of decreasing farm
values, increasing industrialization, and young women entering the workforce. Civil War
scholars and students alike will learn much from this firsthand account of coming-of-age
during the Civil War.
Minoa D. Uffelman is an associate professor of history at Austin Peay State University.
Ellen Kanervo is professor emerita of communications at Austin Peay State University.
Phyllis Smith is retired from the U.S. Army and currently teaches high school science in
Montgomery County, Tennessee. Eleanor Williams is the Montgomery County, Tennessee,
historian.
[more]
Fifty Cents and a Box Top
The Creative Life of Nashville Session Musician Charlie McCoy
Charlie McCoy
West Virginia University Press, 2017
From Ann-Margret to Bob Dylan and George Jones to Simon & Garfunkel, Nashville harmonica virtuoso and multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy has contributed to some of the most successful recordings of country, pop, and rock music of the last six decades. As the leader of the Hee Haw “Million-Dollar Band,” McCoy spent more than two decades appearing on the television screens of country music fans around the United States. And, as a solo artist, he has entertained audiences across North America, Europe, and Japan and has earned numerous honors as a result. Fifty Cents and a Box Top: The Creative Life of Nashville Session Musician Charlie McCoy offers rare firsthand insights into life in the recording studio, on the road, and on the small screen as Nashville became a leading center of popular music production in the 1960s and as a young McCoy established himself as one of the most sought after session musicians in the country.
[more]
Fort Donelson's Legacy
War and Society in Kentucky and Tennessee, 1862–1863
Benjamin Franklin Cooling
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
Fort Donelson's Legacy portrays the tapestry of war and society in the upper southern heartland of Tennessee and Kentucky after the key Union victories at Forts Henry and Donelson in February 1862. Those victories, notes Benjamin Franklin Cooling, could have delivered the decisive blow to the Confederacy in the West and ended the war in that theater. Instead, what followed was terrible devastation and bloodshed that embroiled soldier and civilian alike.
Cooling compellingly describes a struggle that was marked not only by the movement of armies and the strategies of generals but also by the rise of guerrilla bands and civil resistance. It was, in part, a war fought for geography—for rivers and railroads and for strategic cities such as Nashville, Louisville, and Chattanooga. But it was also a war for the hearts and minds of the populace. "Stubborn civilian opposition to Union invaders," Cooling writes, "prompted oppressive military occupation, subversion of civil liberties, and confiscation of personal property in the name of allegiance to the United States—or to the Confederacy, for that matter, since some Unionist southerners resented Confederate intrusion fully as much as their secessionist neighbors opposed Yankee government."
In exploring the complex terrain of "total war" that steadily engulfed Tennessee and Kentucky, Cooling draws on a huge array of sources, including official military records and countless diaries and memoirs. He makes considerable use of the words of participants to capture the attitudes and concerns of those on both sides. The result is a masterful addition to Civil War literature that integrates the military, social, political, and economic aspects of the conflict into a large and endlessly fascinating picture.
Cooling compellingly describes a struggle that was marked not only by the movement of armies and the strategies of generals but also by the rise of guerrilla bands and civil resistance. It was, in part, a war fought for geography—for rivers and railroads and for strategic cities such as Nashville, Louisville, and Chattanooga. But it was also a war for the hearts and minds of the populace. "Stubborn civilian opposition to Union invaders," Cooling writes, "prompted oppressive military occupation, subversion of civil liberties, and confiscation of personal property in the name of allegiance to the United States—or to the Confederacy, for that matter, since some Unionist southerners resented Confederate intrusion fully as much as their secessionist neighbors opposed Yankee government."
In exploring the complex terrain of "total war" that steadily engulfed Tennessee and Kentucky, Cooling draws on a huge array of sources, including official military records and countless diaries and memoirs. He makes considerable use of the words of participants to capture the attitudes and concerns of those on both sides. The result is a masterful addition to Civil War literature that integrates the military, social, political, and economic aspects of the conflict into a large and endlessly fascinating picture.
[more]
From Frontier to Plantation In Tennessee
A Study in Frontier Democracy
Thomas Perkins Abernethy
University of Alabama Press, 1967
A reprint of Abernethy's excellent historical study of the state of Tennesse from its founding through the antebellum years. In documenting the development of an agrarian society on the frontier, Abernethy develops important and controversial theses on the relation between frontier life and the development of American democracy, calling into question the mythology and motives previously associated with leaders such as William Blount, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.
[more]
From Ridgetops To Riverbottoms
Celebration Outdoor Life In Tennessee
Sam Venable
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
Frontier Swashbuckler
The Life and Legend of John Smith T
Dick Steward
University of Missouri Press, 2000
Few frontiersmen in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century epitomized the reckless energies of the West and the lust for adventure as did John Smith T—pioneer, gunfighter, entrepreneur, militia colonel, miner, judge, and folk hero. In this fascinating biography, Dick Steward traces the colorful Smith T's life from his early days in Virginia through his young adulthood. He then describes Smith T's remarkable career in the wilds of Missouri and his armed raids to gain land from Indians, Spaniards, and others.
Born into the fifth generation of Virginia gentry, young Smith first made his name on the Tennessee frontier. It was there that he added the "T" to his name to distinguish his land titles and other enterprises from those of the hosts of other John Smiths. By the late 1790s he owned or laid claim to more than a quarter million acres in Tennessee and northern Alabama.
In 1797, Smith T moved to Missouri, then a Spanish territory, and sought to gain control of its lead-mining district by displacing the most powerful American in the region, Moses Austin. He acquired such public positions as judge of the court of common pleas, commissioner of weights and levies, and lieutenant colonel of the militia, which enabled him to mount a spirited assault on Austin's virtual monopoly of the lead mines. Although neither side emerged a winner from that ten-year-old conflict, it was during this period that Smith T's fame as a gunfighter and duelist spread across the West. Known as the most dangerous man in Missouri, he was said to have killed fourteen men in duels.
Smith T was also recognized by many for his good works. He donated land for churches and schools and was generous to the poor and downtrodden. He epitomized the opening of the West, helping to build towns, roads, and canals and organizing trading expeditions.
Even though Smith T was one of the most notorious characters in Missouri history, by the late nineteenth century he had all but disappeared from the annals of western history. Frontier Swashbuckler seeks to rescue both the man and the legend from historical obscurity. At the same time, it provides valuable insights into the economic, political, and social dynamics of early Missouri frontier history.
[more]
Geologic Trip Across Tennessee
Interstate 40
Harry L. Moore
University of Tennessee Press, 1994
Gone Dollywood
Dolly Parton’s Mountain Dream
Graham Hoppe
Ohio University Press, 2018
Dolly Parton isn’t just a country music superstar. She has built an empire. At the heart of that empire is Dollywood, a 150-acre fantasy land that hosts three million people a year. Parton’s prodigious talent and incredible celebrity have allowed her to turn her hometown into one of the most popular tourist destinations in America. The crux of Dollywood’s allure is its precisely calibrated Appalachian image, itself drawn from Parton’s very real hardscrabble childhood in the mountains of east Tennessee.
What does Dollywood have to offer besides entertainment? What do we find if we take this remarkable place seriously? How does it both confirm and subvert outsiders’ expectations of Appalachia? What does it tell us about the modern South, and in turn what does that tell us about America at large? How is regional identity molded in service of commerce, and what is the interplay of race, gender, and class when that happens?
In Gone Dollywood, Graham Hoppe blends tourism studies, celebrity studies, cultural analysis, folklore, and the acute observations and personal reflections of longform journalism into an unforgettable interrogation of Southern and American identity.
[more]
Government And Politics In Tennessee
William Lyons
University of Tennessee Press, 2001
Most Americans are more aware of the workings of the federal government than of their own state government. But these “laboratories of democracy” constitute perhaps the most creative and successful component of the American political experiment. Like each of the states, Tennessee state government has a distinct history and a political culture that reflects that history.
This book places Tennessee’s modern political institutions in the context of the history and personalities that formed them. They pay special attention to the period after 1978, when three governors left a lasting impression on the direction and culture of the state government. Separate chapters examine the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, explaining how and why Tennessee’s political culture differs from other states. The book also explores the ways in which education, health care, corrections, and economic development define much of the government agenda. Additional chapters on the media, political campaigns, and local government provide a backdrop that elucidates more fully how the state government functions.
The authors profile many of the personalities who have shaped the state’s political agenda. Among these are longtime Senate Democratic Speaker John Wilder; his close ally, Senate Republican Leader Ben Atchley; House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, son of a Lebanese immigrant; and Bill Snodgrass, who served as State Comptroller for forty-seven years. The book explains how each of these individuals related to three Tennessee governors, Republicans Lamar Alexander and Don Sundquist and Democrat Ned McWherter, whose administrations presided over the state’s greatest period of growth and prosperity.
Illustrated with photographs and tables, and featuring anecdotal sidebars that illuminate key issues, this book will become the standard text on Tennessee state government and politics for years to come.
The Authors: William Lyons is a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee and coauthor of such books as American Government: Politics and Political Culture.
John M. Scheb II is a professor of political science and director of the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Tennessee and coauthor of American Constitutional Law, among other books. In partnership with Dr. Lyons, he provides campaign consulting for political candidates and applied survey research for businesses and organizations.
Billy Stair is director of communication and community outreach at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He served for eighteen years in the legislative and executive branches of state government, including eight years as senior policy advisor to the Governor.
This book places Tennessee’s modern political institutions in the context of the history and personalities that formed them. They pay special attention to the period after 1978, when three governors left a lasting impression on the direction and culture of the state government. Separate chapters examine the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, explaining how and why Tennessee’s political culture differs from other states. The book also explores the ways in which education, health care, corrections, and economic development define much of the government agenda. Additional chapters on the media, political campaigns, and local government provide a backdrop that elucidates more fully how the state government functions.
The authors profile many of the personalities who have shaped the state’s political agenda. Among these are longtime Senate Democratic Speaker John Wilder; his close ally, Senate Republican Leader Ben Atchley; House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, son of a Lebanese immigrant; and Bill Snodgrass, who served as State Comptroller for forty-seven years. The book explains how each of these individuals related to three Tennessee governors, Republicans Lamar Alexander and Don Sundquist and Democrat Ned McWherter, whose administrations presided over the state’s greatest period of growth and prosperity.
Illustrated with photographs and tables, and featuring anecdotal sidebars that illuminate key issues, this book will become the standard text on Tennessee state government and politics for years to come.
The Authors: William Lyons is a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee and coauthor of such books as American Government: Politics and Political Culture.
John M. Scheb II is a professor of political science and director of the Social Science Research Institute at the University of Tennessee and coauthor of American Constitutional Law, among other books. In partnership with Dr. Lyons, he provides campaign consulting for political candidates and applied survey research for businesses and organizations.
Billy Stair is director of communication and community outreach at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He served for eighteen years in the legislative and executive branches of state government, including eight years as senior policy advisor to the Governor.
[more]
Guide to the Vascular Plants of Tennessee
Edward W. Chester
University of Tennessee Press, 2015
The product of twenty-five years of planning, research, and writing, Guide to the Vascular Plants of Tennessee is the most comprehensive, detailed, and up-to-date resource of its kind for the flora of the Volunteer State, home to nearly 2,900 documented taxa. Not since Augustin Gattinger’s 1901 Flora of Tennessee and a Philosophy of Botany has a work of this scope been attempted.
The team of editors, authors, and contributors not only provide keys for identifying the major groups, families, genera, species, and lesser taxa known to be native or naturalized within the state—with supporting information about distribution, frequency of occurrence, conservation status, and more—but they also offer a plethora of descriptive information about the state’s physical environment and vegetation, along with a summary of its rich botanical history, dating back to the earliest Native American inhabitants.
Other features of the book include a comprehensive glossary of botanical terms and an array of line drawings that illustrate the identifying characteristics of vascular plants, from leaf shape and surface features to floral morphology and fruit types. Finally, the book’s extensive keys are indexed by families, scientific names, and common names. The result is a user-friendly work that researchers, students, environmentalists, foresters, conservationists, and indeed anyone interested in Tennessee and its botanical legacy and resources will value for years to come.
Edward W. Chester is professor emeritus of biology at Austin Peay State University, where he taught botany and curated the herbarium for more than forty-five years.
B. Eugene Wofford is director of the University of Tennessee Herbarium and coauthor (with Professor Chester) of Guide to the Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Tennessee.
Joey Shaw is associate professor of biological and environmental sciences at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Dwayne Estes is associate professor of biology and curator of the herbarium at Austin Peay State University.
David H. Webb is a retired biologist from the Tennessee Valley Authority.
In addition, more than 20 experts from throughout the country contributed family or genera treatments, including Andrea Shea Bishop (rare species botanist, Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation), Claude Bailey (associate professor, Jackson State Community College), Hal R. DeSelm (professor emeritus, University of Tennessee), Dennis Horn (amateur botanist and wildflower photographer, retired engineer), Chris Fleming (senior project scientist, BDY Environmental), Aaron Floden (graduate student, University of Tennessee), William H. Martin (professor emeritus, Eastern Kentucky University and former commissioner of Kentucky's Department of Natural Resources), Mary Patten Priestley (curator of the herbarium, The University of the South), and Edward Schilling (professor, University of Tennessee).
The team of editors, authors, and contributors not only provide keys for identifying the major groups, families, genera, species, and lesser taxa known to be native or naturalized within the state—with supporting information about distribution, frequency of occurrence, conservation status, and more—but they also offer a plethora of descriptive information about the state’s physical environment and vegetation, along with a summary of its rich botanical history, dating back to the earliest Native American inhabitants.
Other features of the book include a comprehensive glossary of botanical terms and an array of line drawings that illustrate the identifying characteristics of vascular plants, from leaf shape and surface features to floral morphology and fruit types. Finally, the book’s extensive keys are indexed by families, scientific names, and common names. The result is a user-friendly work that researchers, students, environmentalists, foresters, conservationists, and indeed anyone interested in Tennessee and its botanical legacy and resources will value for years to come.
Edward W. Chester is professor emeritus of biology at Austin Peay State University, where he taught botany and curated the herbarium for more than forty-five years.
B. Eugene Wofford is director of the University of Tennessee Herbarium and coauthor (with Professor Chester) of Guide to the Trees, Shrubs, and Woody Vines of Tennessee.
Joey Shaw is associate professor of biological and environmental sciences at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Dwayne Estes is associate professor of biology and curator of the herbarium at Austin Peay State University.
David H. Webb is a retired biologist from the Tennessee Valley Authority.
In addition, more than 20 experts from throughout the country contributed family or genera treatments, including Andrea Shea Bishop (rare species botanist, Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation), Claude Bailey (associate professor, Jackson State Community College), Hal R. DeSelm (professor emeritus, University of Tennessee), Dennis Horn (amateur botanist and wildflower photographer, retired engineer), Chris Fleming (senior project scientist, BDY Environmental), Aaron Floden (graduate student, University of Tennessee), William H. Martin (professor emeritus, Eastern Kentucky University and former commissioner of Kentucky's Department of Natural Resources), Mary Patten Priestley (curator of the herbarium, The University of the South), and Edward Schilling (professor, University of Tennessee).
[more]
Happy In Service Of Lord
African-American Sacred Vocal Harmony
Kip Lornell
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
Highlander
No Ordinary School Second Edition
John M. Glen
University of Tennessee Press, 1996
A History Of Tennessee Arts
Creating Traditions, Expanding Horizons
C. Van West
University of Tennessee Press, 2003
The harmonies of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the measured brush strokes of painter Lloyd Branson, the intricate basket weaving of Maggie Murphy, the influence of the Agrarian literary movement, and the theater barnstorming of actor-manager Sol Smith—such are the sounds, images, and expressions of Tennessee’s arts legacy.
Through its interlocking themes of tradition and innovation, A History of Tennessee Arts: Creating Traditions, Expanding Horizons traces the story of the arts in Tennessee from its formal, more academic side to its vernacular expressions of culture, self, and community. Both the formal and the vernacular contribute to an understanding of what the arts mean to Tennesseans and, in turn, what Tennesseans have to offer the culture of the state, the region, and the nation. A history of the arts in the Volunteer State becomes, then, an evolving barometer of not only where we have been as a culture, but also how we have matured as a society.
This richly illustrated book, cosponsored by the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Tennessee Historical Society, covers the varieties of art in Tennessee in five parts. The visual arts and architecture section includes chapters on vernacular and high style architecture, sculpture, painting and photography, while the section on craft arts celebrates folk arts such as woodcraft, silversmithing, pottery, and textiles. The section on Tennessee’s rich literary history includes such writers as James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, and Evelyn Scott, while the performing arts are represented by a wealth of storytellers along with two centuries of stage history. Finally, Tennessee is home to—and originator of—much of the music that we know as distinctively American. Contributors to the music section examine gospel, blues, rock, soul, and, of course, country music.
From prehistoric cave paintings to the “cow punk” of Jason and the Scorchers, from the elegant capitol building of William Strickland to Ballet Memphis, and from the unique cantilevered barns of East Tennessee to the chronicles of Alex Haley, the arts in Tennessee truly celebrate traditions and strive to expand our horizons.
The Editor: Carroll Van West is director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University and senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.
Through its interlocking themes of tradition and innovation, A History of Tennessee Arts: Creating Traditions, Expanding Horizons traces the story of the arts in Tennessee from its formal, more academic side to its vernacular expressions of culture, self, and community. Both the formal and the vernacular contribute to an understanding of what the arts mean to Tennesseans and, in turn, what Tennesseans have to offer the culture of the state, the region, and the nation. A history of the arts in the Volunteer State becomes, then, an evolving barometer of not only where we have been as a culture, but also how we have matured as a society.
This richly illustrated book, cosponsored by the Tennessee Arts Commission and the Tennessee Historical Society, covers the varieties of art in Tennessee in five parts. The visual arts and architecture section includes chapters on vernacular and high style architecture, sculpture, painting and photography, while the section on craft arts celebrates folk arts such as woodcraft, silversmithing, pottery, and textiles. The section on Tennessee’s rich literary history includes such writers as James Agee, Robert Penn Warren, and Evelyn Scott, while the performing arts are represented by a wealth of storytellers along with two centuries of stage history. Finally, Tennessee is home to—and originator of—much of the music that we know as distinctively American. Contributors to the music section examine gospel, blues, rock, soul, and, of course, country music.
From prehistoric cave paintings to the “cow punk” of Jason and the Scorchers, from the elegant capitol building of William Strickland to Ballet Memphis, and from the unique cantilevered barns of East Tennessee to the chronicles of Alex Haley, the arts in Tennessee truly celebrate traditions and strive to expand our horizons.
The Editor: Carroll Van West is director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University and senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.
[more]
Industry Technology
Antebellum Tennessee
R. Bruce Council
University of Tennessee Press, 1992
The Jackson Project
War in the American Workplace
Phil Cohen
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
In the spring of 1989, union organizer Phil Cohen journeyed to Jackson, Tennessee, to sort out the troubled situation at a historic cotton mill. His task as a representative of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union was to rebuild a failing local and the problems were daunting; an anti-union company in financial disarray, sharply declining union membership, and myriad workplace grievances. In the tumultuous months ahead, ownership of the plant twice switched hands, and he would come to fear for his life and consider desperate measures to salvage the union’s cause.
In this riveting memoir, Cohen takes the reader from the union hall and factory gates to the bargaining table and courtroom, and ultimately to the picket line. We see him winning the trust of disillusioned union members, negotiating with a hostile employer and its high-powered legal counsel, and hitting the pavement with leaflets and union cards in hand. We get to know the millworkers with whom he formed close bonds, including a stormy romance with a young woman at the plant. His up-close account of the struggle brims with telling descriptions of the negotiating process, the grinding work at the textile mill, the lives of its employees outside the workplace, and the grim realities of union busting in America. When the organizer’s four-year-old daughter accompanies him to the field, a unique an unexpected dimension is added to the chronicle.
A compelling, dramatic story that alternated between major triumphs and frustrating setbacks, The Jackson Project provides a rare look at the labor movement in the American South from an insider’s perspective.
In this riveting memoir, Cohen takes the reader from the union hall and factory gates to the bargaining table and courtroom, and ultimately to the picket line. We see him winning the trust of disillusioned union members, negotiating with a hostile employer and its high-powered legal counsel, and hitting the pavement with leaflets and union cards in hand. We get to know the millworkers with whom he formed close bonds, including a stormy romance with a young woman at the plant. His up-close account of the struggle brims with telling descriptions of the negotiating process, the grinding work at the textile mill, the lives of its employees outside the workplace, and the grim realities of union busting in America. When the organizer’s four-year-old daughter accompanies him to the field, a unique an unexpected dimension is added to the chronicle.
A compelling, dramatic story that alternated between major triumphs and frustrating setbacks, The Jackson Project provides a rare look at the labor movement in the American South from an insider’s perspective.
[more]
The Juan Pardo Expeditions
Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568
Charles Hudson. Afterword by David G. Moore, Robin A. Beck Jr., and ChristopherB. Rodning
University of Alabama Press, 2005
An early Spanish explorer’s account of American Indians.
This volume mines the Pardo documents to reveal a wealth of information pertaining to Pardo’s routes, his encounters and interactions with native peoples, the social, hierarchical, and political structures of the Indians, and clues to the ethnic identities of Indians known previously only through archaeology. The new afterword reveals recent archaeological evidence of Pardo’s Fort San Juan--the earliest site of sustained interaction between Europeans and Indians--demonstrating the accuracy of Hudson’s route reconstructions.
[more]
Knoxville, Tennessee
A Mountain City in the New South
William Bruce Wheeler
University of Tennessee Press, 2005
Knoxville, Tennessee: A Mountain City in the New South is much more than an update to the 1983 edition; it is virtually a complete rethinking of its predecessor as well as an updating of Knoxville’s story from the 1982 World’s Fair to the death of the nearly legendary Cas Walker.In this new edition, Wheeler argues that, like Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby (1925), Knoxvillians have fabricated for themselves a false history, portraying themselves and their city as the almost impotent victims of historical forces that they could neither alter nor control. The result of this myth, Wheeler says, is a collective mentality of near-helplessness against the powerful forces of isolation, poverty, and even change itself. But Knoxville’s past is far more complicated than that, for the city contained abundant material goods and human talent that could have been used to propel Knoxville into the ranks of the premier cities of the New South—if those assets had not slipped through the fingers of both the leaders and the populace. In all, Knoxville’s history is the story of colliding forces—country and city, North and South, the poor and the elite, as well as the story of colorful figures, including Perez Dickinson, Edward Sanford, George Dempster, William Yardley, Louis Brownlow, Cas Walker, Carlene Malone, Victor Ashe, and many, many more.This is not, however, a history–or a future—without hope. Wheeler charts positive changes as well, such as downtown residential movements, urban renewal initiatives, political progressivism, and improving race relations. In many ways, Knoxville’s story parallels the struggles facing all American cities, making this revised edition of interest both as a regional history and as a fascinating case study of American urbanism.William Bruce Wheeler is professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the co-author of TVA and the Tellico Dam: A Bureaucratic Crisis in Post-Industrial America and is currently at work on the sixth edition of Discovering the American Past.
[more]
Knoxville, Tennessee
Continuity Change Appalachian City
Michael J. Mcdonald
University of Tennessee Press, 1983
The Last Billion Years
A Geologic History of Tennessee
Don W. Byerly
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Tennessee’s geologic history has evolved in myriad ways since its initial formation more than a billion years ago, settling into its current place on the North American supercontinent between 300 and 250 million years ago. Throughout that long span of “deep time,” Tennessee’s landscape morphed into its present form.
The Last Billion Years: A Geologic History of Tennessee is the first general overview in more than thirty years to interpret the state’s geological record. With minimal jargon, numerous illustrations and photographs, and a glossary of scientific terms, this volume provides the tools necessary for readers with little or no background in the subject to learn about the geologic formation of Tennessee, making it an excellent resource for high school students, college students, and interested general readers. Yet, because of the depth of its scholarship, the book is also an invaluable reference for professional geologists.
Recognizing that every reader is familiar with the roles of wind, water, gravity, and organisms in their everyday environment, author Don Byerly employs the Earth Systems Science approach, showing how the five interacting parts of the Earth—the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere—have worked together for eons to generate the rock compositions that make up Tennessee’s geologic past.
All regions of the state are covered. Featuring a unique time chart that illustrates the state’s geologic history from east to west, The Last Billion Years shows that while the geologic aspects of the state’s three grand divisions are related in many ways, each division has a distinctly different background. The organization of the book further enhances its usability, allowing the reader to see and compare what was happening contemporaneously across the state during the key sequences of its geologic history. Written in a clear and engaging style, The Last Billion Years will have broad appeal to students, lay readers, and professionals.
The Last Billion Years: A Geologic History of Tennessee is the first general overview in more than thirty years to interpret the state’s geological record. With minimal jargon, numerous illustrations and photographs, and a glossary of scientific terms, this volume provides the tools necessary for readers with little or no background in the subject to learn about the geologic formation of Tennessee, making it an excellent resource for high school students, college students, and interested general readers. Yet, because of the depth of its scholarship, the book is also an invaluable reference for professional geologists.
Recognizing that every reader is familiar with the roles of wind, water, gravity, and organisms in their everyday environment, author Don Byerly employs the Earth Systems Science approach, showing how the five interacting parts of the Earth—the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and cryosphere—have worked together for eons to generate the rock compositions that make up Tennessee’s geologic past.
All regions of the state are covered. Featuring a unique time chart that illustrates the state’s geologic history from east to west, The Last Billion Years shows that while the geologic aspects of the state’s three grand divisions are related in many ways, each division has a distinctly different background. The organization of the book further enhances its usability, allowing the reader to see and compare what was happening contemporaneously across the state during the key sequences of its geologic history. Written in a clear and engaging style, The Last Billion Years will have broad appeal to students, lay readers, and professionals.
[more]
The Legacy of American Copper Smelting
Industrial Heritage versus Environmental Policy
Bode J. Morin
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Throughout world history, copper has been a significant metal for a vast number of cultures, from the oldest civilizations on record to the Bronze Age and Greek and Roman antiquity. Though replaced by iron as the primary metal for tools and weapons in ancient civilizations, copper found new resurgence in the nineteenth century when it was discovered to have particularly high thermal and electrical conductivity. Copper mining quickly escalated into a large-scale industry, and because of its vast reserves and innovative mining techniques, the United States seized the reins of global production with the opening of significant copper mines in Tennessee and Michigan in the 1840s and Montana in the 1870s.
Copper-mining prosperity and America’s dominance of the industry came with a heavy environmental price, however. As rich copper deposits declined with increased mining efforts, large deposits of leaner ores—oftentimes less than one percent pure—had to be mined to keep pace with America’s technological thirst for copper. Processing such ore left an inordinate amount of industrial waste, such as tailings and slag deposits from the refining process and toxic materials from the ores themselves, and copper mining regions around the United States began to see firsthand the landscape degradation wrought by the industry.
In The Legacy of American Copper Smelting, Bode J. Morin examines America’s three premier copper sites: Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, Tennessee’s Copper Basin, and Butte- Anaconda, Montana. Morin focuses on what the copper industry meant to the townspeople working in and around these three major sites while also exploring the smelters’ environmental effects. Each site dealt with pollution management differently, and each site had to balance an EPA-mandated cleanup effort alongside the preservation of a once-proud industry.
Morin’s work sheds new light on the EPA’s efforts to utilize Superfund dollars and/or protocols to erase the environmental consequences of copper-smelting while locals and preservationists tried to keep memories of the copper industry alive in what were dying or declining post-industrial towns. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the American history of copper or heritage preservation studies, as well as historians of modern America, industrial technology, and the environment.
Bode J. Morin is an industrial archaeologist and historic site administrator directing Eckley
Miners’ Village outside of Weatherly, Pennsylvania.
Copper-mining prosperity and America’s dominance of the industry came with a heavy environmental price, however. As rich copper deposits declined with increased mining efforts, large deposits of leaner ores—oftentimes less than one percent pure—had to be mined to keep pace with America’s technological thirst for copper. Processing such ore left an inordinate amount of industrial waste, such as tailings and slag deposits from the refining process and toxic materials from the ores themselves, and copper mining regions around the United States began to see firsthand the landscape degradation wrought by the industry.
In The Legacy of American Copper Smelting, Bode J. Morin examines America’s three premier copper sites: Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, Tennessee’s Copper Basin, and Butte- Anaconda, Montana. Morin focuses on what the copper industry meant to the townspeople working in and around these three major sites while also exploring the smelters’ environmental effects. Each site dealt with pollution management differently, and each site had to balance an EPA-mandated cleanup effort alongside the preservation of a once-proud industry.
Morin’s work sheds new light on the EPA’s efforts to utilize Superfund dollars and/or protocols to erase the environmental consequences of copper-smelting while locals and preservationists tried to keep memories of the copper industry alive in what were dying or declining post-industrial towns. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the American history of copper or heritage preservation studies, as well as historians of modern America, industrial technology, and the environment.
Bode J. Morin is an industrial archaeologist and historic site administrator directing Eckley
Miners’ Village outside of Weatherly, Pennsylvania.
[more]
The Legacy of Tamar
Courage, Faith, and the Common Road of Hope in a West Tennessee Community
Raye Springfield
University of Tennessee Press, 2000
“The Legacy of Tamar centers on Brownsville, Haywood County, Tennessee, where Elbert Williams became the first NAACP official to be abducted and murdered my a white supremacist mob. This fascinating book is a good history of the people of Haywood County through a lens of five generations of an African American family. They endured one of those most oppressive white supremacist societies in the southern United States, but survived, advanced through higher education and training, and for generations achieved great things in their careers and lives despite the harmful effects of Jim Crow and continued racism in America.”
--Bobby L. Lovett, author of The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee: A Narrative History
In this second edition, Raye Springfield brings the story of the Taylor-Springfield family and the community of Brownsville, Haywood County, Tennessee, into the twenty-first century. In 2015, as the fifteenth anniversary of The Legacy of Tamar approached, another important but relatively unknown event was also reaching its seventy-fifth anniversary: the June 1940 lynching of Elbert “Dick” Williams, the first known NAACP official killed during civil rights activities. Williams was a longtime Brownsville resident and secretary of the local NAACP chapter and was killed while organizing a voter registration drive for Haywood County’s black residents. In her preface to the second edition, Springfield recounts the services for Williams (services that were not allowed to be held in 1940), how times in Brownsville, and the nation, have changed, and yet how African Americans continue the fight for racial equality.
The Legacy of Tamar spans two world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and now the changing of the millennium. For the Taylor-Springfield family, ultimately, the dreams of prior generations were realized in the youth of the present day. More than just the story of one family in rural Tennessee, The Legacy of Tamar reflects historic nationwide struggles by African Americans and offers hope for new generations.
--Bobby L. Lovett, author of The Civil Rights Movement in Tennessee: A Narrative History
In this second edition, Raye Springfield brings the story of the Taylor-Springfield family and the community of Brownsville, Haywood County, Tennessee, into the twenty-first century. In 2015, as the fifteenth anniversary of The Legacy of Tamar approached, another important but relatively unknown event was also reaching its seventy-fifth anniversary: the June 1940 lynching of Elbert “Dick” Williams, the first known NAACP official killed during civil rights activities. Williams was a longtime Brownsville resident and secretary of the local NAACP chapter and was killed while organizing a voter registration drive for Haywood County’s black residents. In her preface to the second edition, Springfield recounts the services for Williams (services that were not allowed to be held in 1940), how times in Brownsville, and the nation, have changed, and yet how African Americans continue the fight for racial equality.
The Legacy of Tamar spans two world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and now the changing of the millennium. For the Taylor-Springfield family, ultimately, the dreams of prior generations were realized in the youth of the present day. More than just the story of one family in rural Tennessee, The Legacy of Tamar reflects historic nationwide struggles by African Americans and offers hope for new generations.
[more]
Lethal Punishment
Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South
Vandiver, Margaret
Rutgers University Press, 2005
Why did some offenses in the South end in mob lynchings while similar crimes led to legal executions? Why did still other cases have nonlethal outcomes? In this well-researched and timely book, Margaret Vandiver explores the complex relationship between these two forms of lethal punishment, challenging the assumption that executions consistently grew out of-and replaced-lynchings.
Vandiver begins by examining the incidence of these practices in three culturally and geographically distinct southern regions. In rural northwest Tennessee, lynchings outnumbered legal executions by eleven to one and many African Americans were lynched for racial caste offenses rather than for actual crimes. In contrast, in Shelby County, which included the growing city of Memphis, more men were legally executed than lynched. Marion County, Florida, demonstrated a firmly entrenched tradition of lynching for sexual assault that ended in the early 1930s with three legal death sentences in quick succession.
With a critical eye to issues of location, circumstance, history, and race, Vandiver considers the ways that legal and extralegal processes imitated, influenced, and differed from each other. A series of case studies demonstrates a parallel between mock trials that were held by lynch mobs and legal trials that were rushed through the courts and followed by quick executions.
Tying her research to contemporary debates over the death penalty, Vandiver argues that modern death sentences, like lynchings of the past, continue to be influenced by factors of race and place, and sentencing is comparably erratic.
[more]
Making Medical Doctors
Science and Medicine at Vanderbilt since Flexner
Timothy C. Jacobson
University of Alabama Press, 1988
Making Medical Doctors is not a conventional institutional history, but rather a study of the union of science and medicine in a particularly illustrative institutional setting. Its genral subject is the institution where science and medicine most dramatically came together: the modern medical school and medical center. Its particular subject is the medical school and center of Vanderbilt University, which was rebuilt in the 1920s as a model for medical education and research. Making Medical Doctors also explores the intellectual and financial sources of institutional development: the worlds of Abraham Flexner, Frederick T. Gates, and Henry S. Pritchett, three foundation masters of the early 20th century. It examines closely the vanished medical world of that generation of doctors who reached the height of their influence in the period between the two world wars and describes how they actually did medicine, surgery, and science.
The convergence of science and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries produced what we know today as modern medicine. The balance of power and interdependence between science and medicine have changed vastly from the 1920s and 1930s, as Vanderbilt’s story clearly illustrates.
[more]
Making the Unequal Metropolis
School Desegregation and Its Limits
Ansley T. Erickson
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In a radically unequal United States, schools are often key sites in which injustice grows. Ansley T. Erickson’s Making the Unequal Metropolis presents a broad, detailed, and damning argument about the inextricable interrelatedness of school policies and the persistence of metropolitan-scale inequality. While many accounts of education in urban and metropolitan contexts describe schools as the victims of forces beyond their control, Erickson shows the many ways that schools have been intertwined with these forces and have in fact—via land-use decisions, curricula, and other tools—helped sustain inequality.
Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities’ resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools.
Taking Nashville as her focus, Erickson uncovers the hidden policy choices that have until now been missing from popular and legal narratives of inequality. In her account, inequality emerges not only from individual racism and white communities’ resistance to desegregation, but as the result of long-standing linkages between schooling, property markets, labor markets, and the pursuit of economic growth. By making visible the full scope of the forces invested in and reinforcing inequality, Erickson reveals the complex history of, and broad culpability for, ongoing struggles in our schools.
[more]
Massacre at Cavett's Station
Frontier Tennessee during the Cherokee Wars
Charles H. Faulkner
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
In the late 1700s, as white settlers spilled across the Appalachian Mountains, claiming Cherokee and Creek lands for their own, tensions between Native Americans and pioneers reached a boiling point. Land disputes stemming from the 1791 Treaty of Holston went unresolved, and Knoxville settlers attacked a Cherokee negotiating party led by Chief Hanging Maw resulting in the wounding of the chief and his wife and the death of several Indians. In retaliation, on September 25, 1793, nearly one thousand Cherokee and Creek warriors descended undetected on Knoxville to destroy this frontier town. However, feeling they had been discovered, the Indians focused their rage on Cavett’s Station, a fortified farmstead of Alexander Cavett and his family located in what is now west Knox County. Violating a truce, the war party murdered thirteen men, women, and children, ensuring the story’s status in Tennessee lore.
In Massacre at Cavett’s Station, noted archaeologist and Tennessee historian Charles Faulkner reveals the true story of the massacre and its aftermath, separating historical fact from pervasive legend. In doing so, Faulkner focuses on the interplay of such early Tennessee stalwarts as John Sevier, James White, and William Blount, and the role each played in the white settlement of east Tennessee while drawing the ire of the Cherokee who continued to lose their homeland in questionable treaties. That enmity produced some of history’s notable Cherokee war chiefs including Doublehead, Dragging Canoe, and the notorious Bob Benge, born to a European trader and Cherokee mother, whose red hair and command of English gave him a distinct double identity. But this conflict between the Cherokee and the settlers also produced peace-seeking chiefs such as Hanging Maw and Corn Tassel who helped broker peace on the Tennessee frontier by the end of the 18th century. After only three decades of peaceful co-existence with their white neighbors, the now democratic Cherokee Nation was betrayed and lost the remainder of their homeland in the Trail of Tears.
Faulkner combines careful historical research with meticulous archaeological excavations conducted in developed areas of the west Knoxville suburbs to illuminate what happened on that fateful day in 1793. As a result, he answers significant questions about the massacre and seeks to discover the genealogy of the Cavetts and if any family members survived the attack. This book is an important contribution to the study of frontier history and a long-overdue analysis of one of East Tennessee’s well-known legends.
In Massacre at Cavett’s Station, noted archaeologist and Tennessee historian Charles Faulkner reveals the true story of the massacre and its aftermath, separating historical fact from pervasive legend. In doing so, Faulkner focuses on the interplay of such early Tennessee stalwarts as John Sevier, James White, and William Blount, and the role each played in the white settlement of east Tennessee while drawing the ire of the Cherokee who continued to lose their homeland in questionable treaties. That enmity produced some of history’s notable Cherokee war chiefs including Doublehead, Dragging Canoe, and the notorious Bob Benge, born to a European trader and Cherokee mother, whose red hair and command of English gave him a distinct double identity. But this conflict between the Cherokee and the settlers also produced peace-seeking chiefs such as Hanging Maw and Corn Tassel who helped broker peace on the Tennessee frontier by the end of the 18th century. After only three decades of peaceful co-existence with their white neighbors, the now democratic Cherokee Nation was betrayed and lost the remainder of their homeland in the Trail of Tears.
Faulkner combines careful historical research with meticulous archaeological excavations conducted in developed areas of the west Knoxville suburbs to illuminate what happened on that fateful day in 1793. As a result, he answers significant questions about the massacre and seeks to discover the genealogy of the Cavetts and if any family members survived the attack. This book is an important contribution to the study of frontier history and a long-overdue analysis of one of East Tennessee’s well-known legends.
[more]
Maxine Smith’s Maxine Smith's Unwilling Pupils
Lessons Learned in Memphis's Civil Rights Classroom
Sherry L. Hoppe and Bruce W. Speck
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
Maxine Smith's Unwilling Pupils is the authorized biography of Maxine Atkins Smith. As such it tells the story of the civil rights movement in Memphis from Smith's viewpoint. Primarily based on newspaper accounts from the 1960s and 1970s and on Smith's papers housed at the Memphis Public Library, the book also draws from a rich source of interviews conducted by the coauthors and others.
This book presents a well-balanced historical background of the civil rights era even while serving as a tribute to Maxine Smith and her work. A panoramic view of Maxine's life, Maxine Smith's Unwilling Pupils, presents one woman's struggle as a prism for understanding the human dimensions of the fight for equality.
The biography portrays Smith's lifelong focus on education as she tried to enlighten both blacks and whites about equality and the inalienable rights of all races. Along the way she became the face of the civil rights movement in Memphis during a critical time in the movement's history. Maxine's unwilling pupils often hated her for her outspoken and tenacious advocacy for those rights; her followers loved her for her unwavering commitment to ensure the rights of African Americans.
Smith's selfless struggles as chronicled in this biography will leave no doubt that her influence on the progress of civil rights in Memphis was profound. Moreover, her example of tireless commitment should inspire the efforts of new generations of equal rights activists to come.
Sherry L. Hoppe is president of Austin Peay State University. She has coedited a number of volumes with Bruce W. Speck in the New Directions for Teaching and Learning series. She is coeditor, with Dr. Speck, of Service-Learning: History, Theory, and Issues.
Bruce W. Speck is provost and vice president for academic and student affairs at Austin Peay State University. He is the co-author, with Jordy Rocheleau, of Rights and Wrongs in the College Classroom: Ethical Issues in Postsecondary Teaching. He has written numerous articles and contributed to edited volumes.
This book presents a well-balanced historical background of the civil rights era even while serving as a tribute to Maxine Smith and her work. A panoramic view of Maxine's life, Maxine Smith's Unwilling Pupils, presents one woman's struggle as a prism for understanding the human dimensions of the fight for equality.
The biography portrays Smith's lifelong focus on education as she tried to enlighten both blacks and whites about equality and the inalienable rights of all races. Along the way she became the face of the civil rights movement in Memphis during a critical time in the movement's history. Maxine's unwilling pupils often hated her for her outspoken and tenacious advocacy for those rights; her followers loved her for her unwavering commitment to ensure the rights of African Americans.
Smith's selfless struggles as chronicled in this biography will leave no doubt that her influence on the progress of civil rights in Memphis was profound. Moreover, her example of tireless commitment should inspire the efforts of new generations of equal rights activists to come.
Sherry L. Hoppe is president of Austin Peay State University. She has coedited a number of volumes with Bruce W. Speck in the New Directions for Teaching and Learning series. She is coeditor, with Dr. Speck, of Service-Learning: History, Theory, and Issues.
Bruce W. Speck is provost and vice president for academic and student affairs at Austin Peay State University. He is the co-author, with Jordy Rocheleau, of Rights and Wrongs in the College Classroom: Ethical Issues in Postsecondary Teaching. He has written numerous articles and contributed to edited volumes.
[more]
Memphis In The Great Depression
Roger Biles
University of Tennessee Press, 1986
Nashville in the New Millennium
Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social Belonging
Jamie Winders
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
Beginning in the 1990s, the geography of Latino migration to and within the United States started to shift. Immigrants from Central and South America increasingly bypassed the traditional gateway cities to settle in small cities, towns, and rural areas throughout the nation, particularly in the South. One popular new destination—Nashville, Tennessee—saw its Hispanic population increase by over 400 percent between 1990 and 2000. Nashville, like many other such new immigrant destinations, had little to no history of incorporating immigrants into local life. How did Nashville, as a city and society, respond to immigrant settlement? How did Latino immigrants come to understand their place in Nashville in the midst of this remarkable demographic change? In Nashville in the New Millennium, geographer Jamie Winders offers one of the first extended studies of the cultural, racial, and institutional politics of immigrant incorporation in a new urban destination. Moving from schools to neighborhoods to Nashville’s wider civic institutions, Nashville in the New Millennium details how Nashville’s long-term residents and its new immigrants experienced daily life as it transformed into a multicultural city with a new cosmopolitanism. Using an impressive array of methods, including archival work, interviews, and participant observation, Winders offers a fine-grained analysis of the importance of historical context, collective memories and shared social spaces in the process of immigrant incorporation. Lacking a shared memory of immigrant settlement, Nashville’s long-term residents turned to local history to explain and interpret a new Latino presence. A site where Latino day laborers gathered, for example, became a flashpoint in Nashville’s politics of immigration in part because the area had once been a popular gathering place for area teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s. Teachers also drew from local historical memories, particularly the busing era, to make sense of their newly multicultural student body. They struggled, however, to help immigrant students relate to the region’s complicated racial past, especially during history lessons on the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights movement. When Winders turns to life in Nashville’s neighborhoods, she finds that many Latino immigrants opted to be quiet in public, partly in response to negative stereotypes of Hispanics across Nashville. Long-term residents, however, viewed this silence as evidence of a failure to adapt to local norms of being neighborly. Filled with voices from both long-term residents and Latino immigrants, Nashville in the New Millennium offers an intimate portrait of the changing geography of immigrant settlement in America. It provides a comprehensive picture of Latino migration’s impact on race relations in the country and is an especially valuable contribution to the study of race and ethnicity in the South.
[more]
Nashville
The Western Confederacy'S Final Gamble
James Lee Mcdonough
University of Tennessee Press, 2004
After Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces ravaged Atlanta in 1864, Ulysses S. Grant urged him to complete the primary mission Grant had given him: to destroy the Confederate Army in Georgia. Attempting to draw the Union army north, General John Bell Hood’s Confederate forces focused their attacks on Sherman’s supply line, the railroad from Chattanooga, and then moved across north Alabama and into Tennessee. As Sherman initially followed Hood’s men to protect the railroad, Hood hoped to lure the Union forces out of the lower South and, perhaps more important, to recapture the long-occupied city of Nashville.
Though Hood managed to cut communication between Sherman and George H. Thomas’s Union forces by placing his troops across the railroads south of the city, Hood’s men were spread over a wide area and much of the Confederate cavalry was in Murfreesboro. Hood’s army was ultimately routed. Union forces pursued the Confederate troops for ten days until they recrossed the Tennessee River. The decimated Army of Tennessee (now numbering only about 15,000) retreated into northern Alabama and eventually Mississippi. Hood requested to be relieved of his command. Less than four months later, the war was over.
Written in a lively and engaging style, Nashville presents new interpretations of the critical issues of the battle. James Lee McDonough sheds light on how the Union army stole past the Confederate forces at Spring Hill and their subsequent clash, which left six Confederate generals dead. He offers insightful analysis of John Bell Hood’s overconfidence in his position and of the leadership and decision-making skills of principal players such as Sherman, George Henry Thomas, John M. Schofield, Hood, and others.
Within the pages of Nashville, McDonough’s subjects, both common soldiers and officers, present their unforgettable stories in their own words. Unlike most earlier studies of the battle of Nashville, McDonough’s account examines the contributions of black Union regiments and gives a detailed account of the battle itself as well as its place in the overall military campaign. Filled with new information from important primary sources and fresh insights, Nashville will become the definitive treatment of a crucial battleground of the Civil War.
James Lee McDonough is retired professor of history from Auburn University. He is the author of numerous books on the Civil War, including Shiloh—In Hell Before Night, Chattanooga—Death Grip on the Confederacy, and War in Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville.
Though Hood managed to cut communication between Sherman and George H. Thomas’s Union forces by placing his troops across the railroads south of the city, Hood’s men were spread over a wide area and much of the Confederate cavalry was in Murfreesboro. Hood’s army was ultimately routed. Union forces pursued the Confederate troops for ten days until they recrossed the Tennessee River. The decimated Army of Tennessee (now numbering only about 15,000) retreated into northern Alabama and eventually Mississippi. Hood requested to be relieved of his command. Less than four months later, the war was over.
Written in a lively and engaging style, Nashville presents new interpretations of the critical issues of the battle. James Lee McDonough sheds light on how the Union army stole past the Confederate forces at Spring Hill and their subsequent clash, which left six Confederate generals dead. He offers insightful analysis of John Bell Hood’s overconfidence in his position and of the leadership and decision-making skills of principal players such as Sherman, George Henry Thomas, John M. Schofield, Hood, and others.
Within the pages of Nashville, McDonough’s subjects, both common soldiers and officers, present their unforgettable stories in their own words. Unlike most earlier studies of the battle of Nashville, McDonough’s account examines the contributions of black Union regiments and gives a detailed account of the battle itself as well as its place in the overall military campaign. Filled with new information from important primary sources and fresh insights, Nashville will become the definitive treatment of a crucial battleground of the Civil War.
James Lee McDonough is retired professor of history from Auburn University. He is the author of numerous books on the Civil War, including Shiloh—In Hell Before Night, Chattanooga—Death Grip on the Confederacy, and War in Kentucky: From Shiloh to Perryville.
[more]
Natural History Mount Le Conte
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 1998
Widely regarded as the crown jewel of the Great Smoky Mountains, Mount Le Conte harbors the greatest concentration of notable geological features in all of the Smokies. This unique book tells the history of the mountain, offering visitors a greater appreciation of its scenic splendor.
Kenneth Wise and Ron Petersen combine their intimate knowledge of Le Conte with a wealth of scientific and historical information. Following introductory coverage of the mountain’s geologic history and human exploration, they follow the six main trails up the mountain—Alum Cave, Bullhead, Rainbow Falls, Trillium Gap, Brushy Mountain, and the Boulevard—and reveal each one to be not merely a path but also a rich source of historical and personal testimony. A final chapter covers the distinguishing features of the summit itself.
Along each route, the authors explain how the trail was developed and provide background for well-known landmarks, from Inspiration Point to Huggins Hell. They offer informative descriptions of the plants and wildlife indigenous to Mount Le Conte as well as observations on the effects of environmental changes on the landscape.
The book is illustrated with dozens of photographs, many of historic interest.
Kenneth Wise is an associate professor at the John C. Hodges Library and the author of Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains. Ron Petersen is a distinguished professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
[more]
New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee
Intellectual, Methodological, and Theoretical Contributions
David H. Dye
University of Alabama Press, 2016
New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee tells the engrossing story of Southeastern archaeology in the 1930s. The Tennessee Valley Authority Act of May 1933 initiated an ambitious program of flood control and power generation by way of a chain of hydroelectric dams on the Tennessee River. The construction of these dams flooded hundreds of thousands of square miles of river bottoms, campsites, villages, and towns that had been homes to Native Americans for centuries. This triggered an urgent need to undertake extensive archaeological fieldwork throughout the region. Those studies continue to influence contemporary archaeology.
The state of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley were especially well suited research targets thanks to their mild climate and long field seasons. A third benefit in the 1930s was the abundance of labor supplied by Tennesseans unemployed during the Great Depression. Within months of the passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, teams of archaeologists fanned out across the state and region under the farsighted direction of Smithsonian Institution curators Neil M. Judd, Frank H. H. Roberts, and Frank M. Setzler. The early months of 1934 would become the busiest period of archaeological fieldwork in US history.
The twelve insightful essays in New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee document and explore this unique peak in archaeological study. Chapters highlight then-new techniques such as mound “peeling” and stratigraphic excavation adapted from the University of Chicago; the four specific New Deal sites of Watts Bar Reservoir, Mound Bottom, Pack, and Chickamauga Basin; bioarchaeology in the New Deal; and the enduring impact of the New Deal on contemporary fieldwork.
The challenges of the 1930s in recruiting skilled labor, training unskilled ancillary labor, developing and improvising new field methods, and many aspects of archaeological policies, procedures, and best-practices laid much of the foundation of contemporary archaeological practice. New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee offers an invaluable record of that pivotal time for professional, student, and amateur archaeologists.
The state of Tennessee and the Tennessee Valley were especially well suited research targets thanks to their mild climate and long field seasons. A third benefit in the 1930s was the abundance of labor supplied by Tennesseans unemployed during the Great Depression. Within months of the passage of the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, teams of archaeologists fanned out across the state and region under the farsighted direction of Smithsonian Institution curators Neil M. Judd, Frank H. H. Roberts, and Frank M. Setzler. The early months of 1934 would become the busiest period of archaeological fieldwork in US history.
The twelve insightful essays in New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee document and explore this unique peak in archaeological study. Chapters highlight then-new techniques such as mound “peeling” and stratigraphic excavation adapted from the University of Chicago; the four specific New Deal sites of Watts Bar Reservoir, Mound Bottom, Pack, and Chickamauga Basin; bioarchaeology in the New Deal; and the enduring impact of the New Deal on contemporary fieldwork.
The challenges of the 1930s in recruiting skilled labor, training unskilled ancillary labor, developing and improvising new field methods, and many aspects of archaeological policies, procedures, and best-practices laid much of the foundation of contemporary archaeological practice. New Deal Archaeology in Tennessee offers an invaluable record of that pivotal time for professional, student, and amateur archaeologists.
[more]
The New Negro in the Old South
Briggs, Gabriel A
Rutgers University Press, 2015
Standard narratives of early twentieth-century African American history credit the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern metropolises for the emergence of the New Negro, an educated, upwardly mobile sophisticate very different from his forebears. Yet this conventional history overlooks the cultural accomplishments of an earlier generation, in the black communities that flourished within southern cities immediately after Reconstruction.
In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois.
The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance.
In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois.
The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance.
[more]
Night Riders
Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890–1915
Christopher Waldrep
Duke University Press, 1993
In the late nineteenth century, industrialization was making its way into rural America. In an agricultural region of Kentucky and Tennessee called the Black Patch for the dark tobacco grown there, big business arrived with a vengeance, eliminating competition, manipulating prices, and undermining local control. The farmers fought back. Night Riders tells the story of the struggle that followed, and reveals the ambiguities and complexities of a drama that convulsed this community for over two decades.
Christopher Waldrep shows that, contrary to many accounts, these wealthy tobacco planters did not resist these new forces simply because of a nostalgia for a bygone time. Instead, many sought to become modern capitalists themselves--but on their own terms. The South's rural elite found their ability to hire and control black labor--the established racial practice of the community--threatened by the low prices offered by big companies for their raw materials. In response, farmers organized and demanded better prices for their tobacco. The tobacco companies then attempted to divide the farmers by offering higher prices to those willing to break with the others. When some cultivators succumbed, their betrayal awakened a deeply rooted vigilante tradition that called for the protection of community at all costs. Waldrep analyzes the spasm of violence that ensued in which horsemen, riding at night, destroyed tobacco barns and the warehouses where the companies stored their tobacco. But despite this fierce upheaval, the Black Patch community endured.
The most thorough treatment ever given to the Black Patch war, Night Riders illuminates a moment in history in which the traditional and the modern, the rural and the industrial, fought for the future--and past--of a community.
Christopher Waldrep shows that, contrary to many accounts, these wealthy tobacco planters did not resist these new forces simply because of a nostalgia for a bygone time. Instead, many sought to become modern capitalists themselves--but on their own terms. The South's rural elite found their ability to hire and control black labor--the established racial practice of the community--threatened by the low prices offered by big companies for their raw materials. In response, farmers organized and demanded better prices for their tobacco. The tobacco companies then attempted to divide the farmers by offering higher prices to those willing to break with the others. When some cultivators succumbed, their betrayal awakened a deeply rooted vigilante tradition that called for the protection of community at all costs. Waldrep analyzes the spasm of violence that ensued in which horsemen, riding at night, destroyed tobacco barns and the warehouses where the companies stored their tobacco. But despite this fierce upheaval, the Black Patch community endured.
The most thorough treatment ever given to the Black Patch war, Night Riders illuminates a moment in history in which the traditional and the modern, the rural and the industrial, fought for the future--and past--of a community.
[more]
Night Riders of Reelfoot Lake
Paul Vanderwood
University of Alabama Press, 2003
A notable and tragic case of the struggle between legal and social justice.
Reelfoot Lake has been a hunting and fishing paradise from the time of its creation in 1812, when the New Madrid earthquake caused the Mississippi River to flow backward into low-lying lands. Situated in the northwestern corner of the state of Tennessee, it attracted westward-moving pioneers, enticing some to settle permanently on its shores.
Threatened in 1908 with the loss of their homes and livelihoods to aggressive, outsider capitalists, rural folk whose families had lived for generations on the bountiful lake donned hoods and gowns and engaged in “night riding,” spreading mayhem and death throughout the region as they sought vigilante justice. They had come to regard the lake as their own, by “squatters' rights,” but now a group of entrepreneurs from St. Louis had bought the titles to the land beneath the shallow lake and were laying legal claim to Reelfoot in its entirety. People were hanged, beaten, and threatened and property destroyed before the state militia finally quelled the uprising. A compromise that made the lake public property did not entirely heal the wounds which continue to this day.
Paul Vanderwood reconstructs these harrowing events from newspapers and other accounts of the time. He also obtained personal interviews with participants and family members who earlier had remained mum, still fearing prosecution. The Journal of American History declares his book “the complete and authentic treatment” of the horrific dispute and its troubled aftermath.
[more]
Nothing Gold Can Stay
A Memoir
Walter Sullivan
University of Missouri Press, 2006
In his enduring fiction and criticism, Walter Sullivan has invited readers to share the thoughts of a penetrating, contemporary intellect. Now he turns his pen on his own life to forge a stirring memoir that fondly recounts the life of the mind.
From childhood in 1920s Nashville, where his father died three months after he was born, to the halls of Vanderbilt University, where he taught creative writing for more than fifty years, Sullivan recalls key episodes in his life—often pausing to ponder why some memories of seemingly trivial events persist while others, seemingly more important, have faded from view.
As witness to a series of social and cultural moments, Sullivan passes on his sharp observations about depression and war, southern renascence and civil rights. He also includes lively anecdotes and sharp character sketches, with personalities ranging from his grandmother “Chigger” and Sally Fudge—who had lived through the Civil War and was said to attend the funerals of people she didn’t know—to Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt, with whose eccentricities he sometimes had to contend.
Readers will discover a treasure trove of insights, as Sullivan’s views of academic life are complemented by remembrances of important writers: John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, Flannery O’Connor, and a host of others, blending the formal and familiar in a style befitting a lingering southernness. He also recalls his shock at being branded a racist by Kingsley Amis and addresses issues of race in academia and southern culture. Throughout his career, he sees himself as a guardian of lost causes, continuing to teach an appreciation of literature in the face of encroaching post-structuralism and political correctness.
Laced with humor while maintaining a profound seriousness about what really matters in life, Nothing Gold Can Stay is a lively narrative of a life well lived that will charm any reader interested in American society during and after the Great Depression. Graced with emotional coherence achieved by an almost ironic tone that is sustained from first sentence to last, it is a book in which a distinguished writer considers his world—and his own mortality—and leaves us richer for it.
[more]
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
First Fifty Years
Leland Johnson
University of Tennessee Press, 1994
Off to a Good Start
Social and Emotional Development of Memphis’ Children
Laurie T. Martin
RAND Corporation, 2015
Drawing on national, state, and local data, the Urban Child Institute partnered with RAND to explore the social and emotional well-being of children in Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn. The book highlights the importance of factors in the home, child care setting, and community that contribute to social and emotional development.
[more]
Opportunity Lost
Race and Poverty in the Memphis City Schools
Marcus D. Pohlmann
University of Tennessee Press, 2008
In Opportunity Lost, Marcus D. Pohlmann examines the troubling issue of why Memphis city school students are underperforming at alarming rates. His provocative interdisciplinary analysis, combining both history and social science, examines the events before and after desegregation, compares a city school to an affluent suburban school to pinpoint imbalances, and offers critical assessments of various educational reforms.
Employing a rich trove of data to demonstrate the realities of racial and economic inequality, Pohlmann underscores the difficulties that plague the urban schools and their students-problems that persist despite the fact that the city schools often have more resource advantages than the county schools: better student-to-teacher ratios, more teachers with advanced degrees, and even greater spending on each student. Pohlmann demonstrates that post-industrial economic shifts and continuing racial exclusion have resulted in a predominance of low-income students at these schools. This economic disadvantage has had a lasting impact on performance among students at all grade levels and has not been reversed simply by increasing resources.
In addition to his analysis of the problems, Pohlmann lays out educational reforms that run the gamut from early intervention and parental involvement to increasing class size and teacher compensation, improving time utilization, and more. Pohlmann's illuminating and original study has wide application for a problem that bedevils inner-city children everywhere and prevents the promise of equality from reaching all of our nation's citizens.
Marcus D. Pohlmann is professor of political science at Rhodes College. He is the author of Governing the Postindustrial City; coauthor, with Michael P. Kirby, of Racial Politics at the Crossroads: Memphis Elects W. W. Herenton; and editor of the six-volume African American Political Thought.
[more]
Parties Politics Sectional Conflict
Tennessee 1832-1861
Jonathan M. Atkins
University of Tennessee Press, 1997
In this thought-provoking study, Jonathan M. Atkins provides a fresh look at the partisan ideological battles that marked the political culture of antebellum Tennessee. He argues that the legacy of party politics was a key factor in shaping Tennessee's hesitant course during the crisis of Union in 1860–61.
Between the Jacksonian era and the outbreak of the Civil War, Atkins demonstrates, the competition between Democrats and Whigs in Tennessee was as heated as any in the country. The conflict centered largely on differing conceptions of republican liberty and each party's contention that the other posed a serious threat to that liberty. As the slavery question pushed to the forefront of national politics, Tennessee's parties absorbed the issue into the partisan tumult that already existed. Both parties pledged to defend southern interests while preserving the integrity of the Union. Appeals for the defense of liberty and Union interests proved effective with voters and profoundly influenced the state's actions during the secession crisis. The belief that a new national Union party could preserve the Union while checking the Lincoln administration encouraged voters initially to reject secession. With the outbreak of war, however, West and Middle Tennesseans chose to accept disunion to avoid what they saw as coercion and military despotism by the North. East Tennesseans, meanwhile, preferred loyalty to the Union over membership in a Southern confederacy dominated by a slaveholding aristocracy.
No previous book has so clearly detailed the role of party politics and ideology in Tennessee's early history. As Atkins shows, the ideological debate helps to explain not only the character and survival of Tennessee's party system but also the peristent strength of unionism in a state that ultimately joined the Southern cause.
The Author: Jonathan M. Atkins is assistant professor of history at Berry College in Mt. Berry, Georgia.
[more]
Paths Of Past
Tennessee 1770-1970
Paul H. Bergeron
University of Tennessee Press, 1979
Pilgrimage to Dollywood
A Country Music Road Trip through Tennessee
Helen Morales
University of Chicago Press, 2014
A star par excellence, Dolly Parton is one of country music’s most likable personalities. Even a hard-rocking punk or orchestral aesthete can’t help cracking a smile or singing along with songs like “Jolene” and “9 to 5.” More than a mere singer or actress, Parton is a true cultural phenomenon, immediately recognizable and beloved for her talent, tinkling laugh, and steel magnolia spirit. She is also the only female star to have her own themed amusement park: Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Every year thousands of fans flock to Dollywood to celebrate the icon, and Helen Morales is one of those fans.
In Pilgrimage to Dollywood, Morales sets out to discover Parton’s Tennessee. Her travels begin at the top celebrity pilgrimage site of Elvis Presley’s Graceland, then take her to Loretta Lynn’s ranch in Hurricane Mills; the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville; to Sevierville, Gatlinburg, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and finally to Pigeon Forge, home of the “Dolly Homecoming Parade,” featuring the star herself as grand marshall. Morales’s adventure allows her to compare the imaginary Tennessee of Parton’s lyrics with the real Tennessee where the singer grew up, looking at essential connections between country music, the land, and a way of life. It’s also a personal pilgrimage for Morales. Accompanied by her partner, Tony, and their nine-year-old daughter, Athena (who respectively prefer Mozart and Miley Cyrus), Morales, a recent transplant from England, seeks to understand America and American values through the celebrity sites and attractions of Tennessee.
This celebration of Dolly and Americana is for anyone with an old country soul who relies on music to help understand the world, and it is guaranteed to make a Dolly Parton fan of anyone who has not yet fallen for her music or charisma.
In Pilgrimage to Dollywood, Morales sets out to discover Parton’s Tennessee. Her travels begin at the top celebrity pilgrimage site of Elvis Presley’s Graceland, then take her to Loretta Lynn’s ranch in Hurricane Mills; the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville; to Sevierville, Gatlinburg, and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and finally to Pigeon Forge, home of the “Dolly Homecoming Parade,” featuring the star herself as grand marshall. Morales’s adventure allows her to compare the imaginary Tennessee of Parton’s lyrics with the real Tennessee where the singer grew up, looking at essential connections between country music, the land, and a way of life. It’s also a personal pilgrimage for Morales. Accompanied by her partner, Tony, and their nine-year-old daughter, Athena (who respectively prefer Mozart and Miley Cyrus), Morales, a recent transplant from England, seeks to understand America and American values through the celebrity sites and attractions of Tennessee.
This celebration of Dolly and Americana is for anyone with an old country soul who relies on music to help understand the world, and it is guaranteed to make a Dolly Parton fan of anyone who has not yet fallen for her music or charisma.
[more]
Pinson Mounds
Middle Woodland Ceremonialism in the Midsouth
Robert C. Mainfort Jr.
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
Pinson Mounds: Middle Woodland Ceremonialism in the Midsouth is a comprehensive overview and reinterpretation of the largest Middle Woodland mound complex in the Southeast. Located in west Tennessee about ten miles south of Jackson, the Pinson Mounds complex includes at least thirteen mounds, a geometric earthen embankment, and contemporary short-term occupation areas within an area of about four hundred acres. A unique feature of Pinson Mounds is the presence of five large, rectangular platform mounds from eight to seventy-two feet in height. Around A.D. 100, Pinson Mounds was a pilgrimage center that drew visitors from well beyond the local population and accommodated many distinct cultural groups and people of varied social stations. Stylistically nonlocal ceramics have been found in virtually every excavated locality, all together representing a large portion of the Southeast. Along with an overview of this important and unique mound complex, Pinson Mounds also provides a reassessment of roughly contemporary centers in the greater Midsouth and Lower Mississippi Valley and challenges past interpretations of the Hopewell phenomenon in the region.
[more]
Pox, Empire, Shackles, and Hides
The Townsend Site, 1670-1715
Jon Bernard Marcoux
University of Alabama Press, 2010
The late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries were an extremely turbulent time for southeastern American Indian groups. Indeed, between the founding of the Charles Town colony along the south Atlantic coast in 1670 and the outbreak of the Yamasee War in 1715, disease, warfare, and massive population displacements dramatically altered the social, political, and economic landscape of the entire region. This volume examines issues of culture contact and social identity by exploring how this chaotic period played out in the daily lives of Cherokee households, especially those excavated at the Townsend site in eastern Tennessee.
Marcoux studies the material remains of daily life in order to identify the strategies that households enacted while adapting to the social, political, and economic disruptions associated with European contact. The author focuses on households as the basic units of analysis because these represent the most fundamental and pervasive unit of economic and social production in the archaeological record. His investigations show how the daily lives of Cherokee households changed dramatically as they coped with the shifting social, political, and economic currents of the times. He demonstrates that the community excavated at the Townsend site was formed by immigrant households who came together from geographically disparate and ethnically distinct Cherokee settlements as a way to ameliorate population losses. He also explores changes in community and household patterning, showing how the spatial organization of the Townsend community became less formal and how households became more transient compared to communities predating contact with Europeans. From this evidence, Marcoux concludes that these changes reflect a broader strategic shift to a more flexible lifestyle that would have aided Cherokee households in negotiating the social, political, and economic uncertainty of the period.
[more]
The Prehistoric Native American Art of Mud Glyph Cave
Charles H. Faulkner
University of Tennessee Press, 1986
The Ramseys at Swan Pond
The Archaeology and History of an East Tennessee Farm
Charles H. Faulkner
University of Tennessee Press, 2007
The Ramsey House was built in 1797 for Col. Francis Alexander Ramsey, a prominent early settler of East Tennessee who, along with his two sons J. G. M. Ramsey and William B. A. Ramsey, shaped the physical and cultural landscape of what would become Knox county and Knoxville, Tennessee. The one-hundred-acre homestead, referred to by Colonel Ramsey as Swan Pond, contained the Ramsey home as well as other outbuildings and slave quarters. In 1952, the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee purchased the tract of land, and the Ramsey House is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Charles H. Faulkner began archaeological investigations at the Ramsey House in 1985 and concluded his work with his retirement from the University of Tennessee's anthropology department in 2005. During his tenure with the Ramsey House Archaeological Project, Faulkner and his team of scholars and students unearthed the prehistory of Native American occupation at Swan Pond, several outbuilding and early home foundation features yielding evidence of extensive early renovations to the Ramsey House and surrounding Swan Pond, and a multitude of ceramics and other artifacts left behind by the Ramsey family and other tenants ranging in dates from the late 1700s to the 1950s. Faulkner's research presented in The Ramseys at Swan Pond reveals not only the material culture and family lifeways of early wealth in East Tennessee, but chronicles the occupation of a homestead that would become pivotal to the development of early Knoxville and Knox County and offers insights into the responsibilities Ramsey and his family undertook in order to tame an early American frontier.
Faulkner provides the reader a complete overview of the excavations, and emphasizes the importance of historic research within the discipline of archaeology in his introduction. The Ramseys at Swan Pond will be of interest to anyone studying historic archeology, the early American frontier, and Tennessee history.
Charles H. Faulkner is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. He is the author/editor of The Prehistoric Native American Art of Mud Glyph Cave, The Old Stone Fort: Exploring an Archaeological Mystery, Rock Art of the Eastern Woodlands, and numerous other essays.
Charles H. Faulkner began archaeological investigations at the Ramsey House in 1985 and concluded his work with his retirement from the University of Tennessee's anthropology department in 2005. During his tenure with the Ramsey House Archaeological Project, Faulkner and his team of scholars and students unearthed the prehistory of Native American occupation at Swan Pond, several outbuilding and early home foundation features yielding evidence of extensive early renovations to the Ramsey House and surrounding Swan Pond, and a multitude of ceramics and other artifacts left behind by the Ramsey family and other tenants ranging in dates from the late 1700s to the 1950s. Faulkner's research presented in The Ramseys at Swan Pond reveals not only the material culture and family lifeways of early wealth in East Tennessee, but chronicles the occupation of a homestead that would become pivotal to the development of early Knoxville and Knox County and offers insights into the responsibilities Ramsey and his family undertook in order to tame an early American frontier.
Faulkner provides the reader a complete overview of the excavations, and emphasizes the importance of historic research within the discipline of archaeology in his introduction. The Ramseys at Swan Pond will be of interest to anyone studying historic archeology, the early American frontier, and Tennessee history.
Charles H. Faulkner is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Tennessee. He is the author/editor of The Prehistoric Native American Art of Mud Glyph Cave, The Old Stone Fort: Exploring an Archaeological Mystery, Rock Art of the Eastern Woodlands, and numerous other essays.
[more]
Room 306
The National Story of the Lorraine Motel
Ben Kamin
Michigan State University Press, 2012
A tragic landmark in the civil rights movement, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis is best known for what occurred there on April 4, 1968. As he stood on the balcony of Room 306, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, ending a golden age of nonviolent resistance, and sparking riots in more than one hundred cities. Formerly a seedy, segregated motel, and prior to that a brothel, the motel quickly achieved the status of national shrine. The motel attracts a variety of pilgrims—white politicians seeking photo ops, aging civil rights leaders, New Age musicians, and visitors to its current incarnation, the National Civil Rights Museum. A moving and emotional account that comprises a panorama of voices, Room 306 is an important oral history unlike any other.
[more]
Sapphic Slashers
Sex, Violence, and American Modernity
Lisa Duggan
Duke University Press, 2000
On a winter day in 1892, in the broad daylight of downtown Memphis, Tennessee, a middle class woman named Alice Mitchell slashed the throat of her lover, Freda Ward, killing her instantly. Local, national, and international newspapers, medical and scientific publications, and popular fiction writers all clamored to cover the ensuing “girl lovers” murder trial. Lisa Duggan locates in this sensationalized event the emergence of the lesbian in U.S. mass culture and shows how newly “modern” notions of normality and morality that arose from such cases still haunt and distort lesbian and gay politics to the present day.
Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of sex and violence were crucial to the development of American modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form of American citizenship. Having explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media—and in particular their tendency toward sensationalism—Duggan moves next to a review of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Sapphic Slashers concludes with two appendices, one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward’s murder, the trial, and Mitchell’s eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women prior to the crime.
Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, Sapphic Slashers provides the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.
Situating this story alongside simultaneously circulating lynching narratives (and its resistant versions, such as those of Memphis antilynching activist Ida B. Wells) Duggan reveals how stories of sex and violence were crucial to the development of American modernity. While careful to point out the differences between the public reigns of terror that led to many lynchings and the rarer instances of the murder of one woman by another privately motivated woman, Duggan asserts that dominant versions of both sets of stories contributed to the marginalization of African Americans and women while solidifying a distinctly white, male, heterosexual form of American citizenship. Having explored the role of turn-of-the-century print media—and in particular their tendency toward sensationalism—Duggan moves next to a review of sexology literature and to novels, most notably Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Sapphic Slashers concludes with two appendices, one of which presents a detailed summary of Ward’s murder, the trial, and Mitchell’s eventual institutionalization. The other presents transcriptions of letters exchanged between the two women prior to the crime.
Combining cultural history, feminist and queer theory, narrative analysis, and compelling storytelling, Sapphic Slashers provides the first history of the emergence of the lesbian in twentieth-century mass culture.
[more]
Serpent Handling Believers
Thomas G Burton
University of Tennessee Press, 1993
The Shiloh Campaign
Edited by Steven E. Woodworth
Southern Illinois University Press, 2009
Some 100,000 soldiers fought in the April 1862 battle of Shiloh, and nearly 20,000 men were killed or wounded; more Americans died on that Tennessee battlefield than had died in all the nation’s previous wars combined. In the first book in his new series, Steven E. Woodworth has brought together a group of superb historians to reassess this significant battleandprovide in-depth analyses of key aspects of the campaign and its aftermath.
The eight talented contributors dissect the campaign’s fundamental events, many of which have not received adequate attention before now. John R. Lundberg examines the role of Albert Sidney Johnston, the prized Confederate commander who recovered impressively after a less-than-stellar performance at forts Henry and Donelson only to die at Shiloh; Alexander Mendoza analyzes the crucial, and perhaps decisive, struggle to defend the Union’s left; Timothy B. Smith investigates the persistent legend that the Hornet’s Nest was the spot of the hottest fighting at Shiloh; Steven E. Woodworth follows Lew Wallace’s controversial march to the battlefield and shows why Ulysses S. Grant never forgave him; Gary D. Joiner provides the deepest analysis available of action by the Union gunboats; Grady McWhineydescribes P. G. T. Beauregard’s decision to stop the first day’s attack and takes issue with his claim of victory; and Charles D. Grear shows the battle’s impact on Confederate soldiers, many of whom did not consider the battle a defeat for their side. In the final chapter, Brooks D. Simpson analyzes how command relationships—specifically the interactions among Grant, Henry Halleck, William T. Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln—affected the campaign and debunks commonly held beliefs about Grant’s reactions to Shiloh’s aftermath.
The Shiloh Campaign will enhance readers’ understanding of a pivotal battle that helped unlock the western theater to Union conquest. It is sure to inspire further study of and debate about one of the American Civil War’s momentous campaigns.
[more]
Slavery In Clover Bottoms
John Mcclines Narrative
Jan Furman
University of Tennessee Press, 1998
Slavery's End In Tennessee
John Cimprich
University of Alabama Press, 1985
This is the first book-length work on wartime race relations in Tennessee, and it stresses the differences within the slave community as well as Military Governor Andrew Johnson’s role in emancipation. In Tennessee a significant number of slaves took advantage of the disruptions resulting from federal invasion to escape servitude and to seek privileges enjoyed by whites. Some rushed into theses changes, believing God had ordained them; others acted simply from a willingness to seize any opportunity for improving their lot. Both groups felt a sense of dignity that their slaves initiated a change; they lacked the power and resources to secure and expand the gains they made on their own.
Because most disloyal slaves supported the Union while most white Tennesseans did not, the federal army eventually decided to encourage and capitalize upon slave discontent. Idealistic Northern reformers simultaneously worked to establish new opportunities for Southern blacks. The reformers’ paternalistic attitudes and the army’s concern with military expediency limited the aid they extended to blacks.
Black poverty, white greed, and white racial prejudice severely restricted change, particularly in the former slaves’ economic position. The more significant changes took the form of new social privileges for the freedmen: familial security, educational opportunities, and religious independence. Masters had occasionally granted these benefits to some slaves, but what the disloyal slaves wanted and won was the formalization of these privileges for all blacks in the state.
[more]
Smokey
The True Stories behind the University of Tennessee’s Beloved Mascot
Thomas J. Mattingly
University of Tennessee Press, 2012
The band blares “Rocky Top” and the crowd roars as the University of Tennessee football team storms out of the tunnel and onto the field through the giant “T,” their beloved mascot Smokey leading the way. The iconic Bluetick Coonhound has been part of the pageantry and tradition at the University of Tennessee since 1953, delighting fans both young and old.
For this entertaining and enlightening book, UT sports historian Thomas J. Mattingly has teamed up with longtime Smokey owner Earl C. Hudson to tell the stories of the nine hounds that have been top dog on campus for more than half a century. It was the Rev. Bill Brooks, Hudson’s brother-in-law, whose prize-winning dog “Brooks’ Blue Smokey,” became the first mascot by winning a student body-led contest at a home football game in 1953. The Coonhound breed was selected because it was native to the state, and several (no one remembers exactly how many) were brought onto the field at halftime to compete. But Smokey stole the show when he threw back his head and howled. The crowd cheered, and Smokey howled again. The raucous applause and barking built to a frenzy. The enthusiastic hound won the hearts of the Volunteer faithful that day, and he and the dogs that followed have remained among the University of Tennessee’s most popular symbols ever since.
The authors have interviewed Smokey’s former handlers, university archivists, sports journalists, and local historians as well as legions of longtime fans. Their recollections provide not only the background of the mascot but a history of UT athletics as well. Vol fans will enjoy reading about Smokey’s adventures throughout the years, from his kidnapping in 1955 by mischievous Kentucky students to his confrontation with the Baylor Bear at the 1957 Sugar Bowl to the time he suffered heat exhaustion at the 1991 UCLA game and was listed on the Vols’ injury report until his return later in the season.
Filled with photographs and memorabilia, including vintage game programs, football schedules, letters, cartoons, and more, this book brings to life the magic of UT football and the endearing canines that have become such an indispensable part of the experience.
THOMAS J. MATTINGLY is the author of Tennessee Football: The Peyton Manning Years, The University of Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006, The University of Tennessee All-Access Football Vault and The University of Tennessee Trivia Book. He writes about Vol history on his Knoxville News Sentinel blog, “The Vol Historian.”
EARL C. HUDSON’s family have cared for the Smokeys since 1994.
For this entertaining and enlightening book, UT sports historian Thomas J. Mattingly has teamed up with longtime Smokey owner Earl C. Hudson to tell the stories of the nine hounds that have been top dog on campus for more than half a century. It was the Rev. Bill Brooks, Hudson’s brother-in-law, whose prize-winning dog “Brooks’ Blue Smokey,” became the first mascot by winning a student body-led contest at a home football game in 1953. The Coonhound breed was selected because it was native to the state, and several (no one remembers exactly how many) were brought onto the field at halftime to compete. But Smokey stole the show when he threw back his head and howled. The crowd cheered, and Smokey howled again. The raucous applause and barking built to a frenzy. The enthusiastic hound won the hearts of the Volunteer faithful that day, and he and the dogs that followed have remained among the University of Tennessee’s most popular symbols ever since.
The authors have interviewed Smokey’s former handlers, university archivists, sports journalists, and local historians as well as legions of longtime fans. Their recollections provide not only the background of the mascot but a history of UT athletics as well. Vol fans will enjoy reading about Smokey’s adventures throughout the years, from his kidnapping in 1955 by mischievous Kentucky students to his confrontation with the Baylor Bear at the 1957 Sugar Bowl to the time he suffered heat exhaustion at the 1991 UCLA game and was listed on the Vols’ injury report until his return later in the season.
Filled with photographs and memorabilia, including vintage game programs, football schedules, letters, cartoons, and more, this book brings to life the magic of UT football and the endearing canines that have become such an indispensable part of the experience.
THOMAS J. MATTINGLY is the author of Tennessee Football: The Peyton Manning Years, The University of Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006, The University of Tennessee All-Access Football Vault and The University of Tennessee Trivia Book. He writes about Vol history on his Knoxville News Sentinel blog, “The Vol Historian.”
EARL C. HUDSON’s family have cared for the Smokeys since 1994.
[more]
Smoky Jack
Kenneth Wise
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
In 1925, Paul Adams was appointed custodian of Mount Le Conte, the third-highest peak of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. His job was to welcome tourists, give guided tours, and establish a camp that would become known as LeConte Lodge, which still stands in what has become America's most popular national park. Adams had everything he needed for the job: a passion for the outdoors, a love of hiking, a desire to preserve the native habitat while welcoming visitors, and the companionship of a remarkable dog.
During his time on the mountains, Adams trained Smoky Jack to be a pack-dog--not just carrying supplies but actually making the four-hour trip to a store in Gatlinburg and back alone. Over the next nine months, Adams and his dog would become inseperable. Smoky Jack became his assistant, bodyguard, and best friend. Throughout Smoky Jack, readers will also gain a unique glimpse into the early days of the Great Smoky Mountains region during the decade before it was name a national park in 1934.
Adams describes the trials and triumphs he and the indomitable German sherpherd faced as they exemplified the ancient relationship between man and dog on Mount Le Conte, building trails, guiding visitors, and making a life in nature. Paul Adams's faithful Smoky Jack stays by his side until the end.
During his time on the mountains, Adams trained Smoky Jack to be a pack-dog--not just carrying supplies but actually making the four-hour trip to a store in Gatlinburg and back alone. Over the next nine months, Adams and his dog would become inseperable. Smoky Jack became his assistant, bodyguard, and best friend. Throughout Smoky Jack, readers will also gain a unique glimpse into the early days of the Great Smoky Mountains region during the decade before it was name a national park in 1934.
Adams describes the trials and triumphs he and the indomitable German sherpherd faced as they exemplified the ancient relationship between man and dog on Mount Le Conte, building trails, guiding visitors, and making a life in nature. Paul Adams's faithful Smoky Jack stays by his side until the end.
[more]
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights
ORGANIZING MEMPHIS WORKERS
Michael K. Honey
University of Illinois Press, 1993
Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the rarely studied southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the cold war, using the strategically located river city of Memphis as a case study. Michael Honey analyzes the economic basis of segregation and the denial of fundamental human rights and civil liberties it entailed.
Frequently telling his story through personal portraits of those directly involved, Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of organizers and ordinary workers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. His study of interracial industrial union organizing locates some of the roots of the 1960s civil rights struggles in this earlier era. Honey provides a new context for understanding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1968 campaign in support of poor people and black labor organizing in Memphis.
This detailed account provides a fresh perspective on African-American, labor, civil rights, and southern history. It clarifies the relationship between labor and civil rights struggles, deepens our understanding of the role of racism in blocking working-class advancement, and emphasizes the importance of southern interracial organizing to the history of social movements in the United States.
Frequently telling his story through personal portraits of those directly involved, Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of organizers and ordinary workers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. His study of interracial industrial union organizing locates some of the roots of the 1960s civil rights struggles in this earlier era. Honey provides a new context for understanding Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 1968 campaign in support of poor people and black labor organizing in Memphis.
This detailed account provides a fresh perspective on African-American, labor, civil rights, and southern history. It clarifies the relationship between labor and civil rights struggles, deepens our understanding of the role of racism in blocking working-class advancement, and emphasizes the importance of southern interracial organizing to the history of social movements in the United States.
[more]
Stealing the General
The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor
Russell S. Bonds
Westholme Publishing, 2007
Selected by Civil War Interactive as One of the Top Civil War Books of All Time
"The definitive book about the Great Locomotive Chase."—Charlotte Observer
"Magnificent and definitive."—Wall Street Journal
"The Great Locomotive Chase has been the stuff of legend and the darling of Hollywood. Now we have a solid history of the Andrews Raid. Russell S. Bonds' stirring account makes clear why the raid failed and what happened to the raiders."—James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"In this gripping, smooth-running account, Bonds zooms effortlessly from broad-stroke overviews of Civil War strategy to minute-by-minute scrutiny of unfolding events on the ground. He sets up the story with a quick, punchy outline of the first year of the war. What follows is a fast-paced, extremely well-told tale of espionage, capture, trial and escape."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Phenomenally well written, organized, and presented."—Civil War Books and Authors
On April 12, 1862—one year to the day after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War—a tall, mysterious smuggler and self-appointed Union spy named James J. Andrews and nineteen infantry volunteers infiltrated north Georgia and stole a steam engine called the General. Racing northward at speeds approaching sixty miles an hour, cutting telegraph lines and destroying track along the way, Andrews planned to open East Tennessee to the Union army, cutting off men and matériel from the Confederate forces in Virginia. If they succeeded, Andrews and his raiders could change the course of the war. But the General's young conductor, William A. Fuller, chased the stolen train first on foot, then by handcar, and finally aboard another engine, the Texas. He pursued the General until, running out of wood and water, Andrews and his men abandoned the doomed locomotive, ending the adventure that would soon be famous as The Great Locomotive Chase. But the ordeal of the soldiers involved was just beginning. In the days that followed, the "engine thieves" were hunted down and captured. Eight were tried and executed as spies, including Andrews. Eight others made a daring escape to freedom, including two assisted by a network of slaves and Union sympathizers. For their actions, before a personal audience with President Abraham Lincoln, six of the raiders became the first men in American history to be awarded the Medal of Honor—the nation's highest decoration for gallantry.
Americans north and south, both at the time and ever since, have been astounded and fascinated by this daring raid. But until now, there has not been a complete history of the entire episode and the fates of all those involved. Based on eyewitness accounts, as well as correspondence, diaries, military records, newspaper reports, deposition testimony and other primary sources, Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor by Russell S. Bonds is a blend of meticulous research and compelling narrative that is now considered to be the definitive history of "the boldest adventure of the war."
[more]
Teller Tales
Histories
Jo Carson
Ohio University Press, 2007
“All my work fits in my mouth,” Jo Carson says. “I write performance material no matter what else the pieces get called, and whether they are for my voice or other characters’ voices . . . they are first to be spoken aloud.” Following an oral tradition that has strong roots in her native Tennessee, the author of Teller Tales invites the reader to participate in events in a way that no conventional history book can.
Both stories in this book are set in East Tennessee in the mid-eighteenth century and share certain characters. The first narrative, “What Sweet Lips Can Do,” recounts the story of the Overmountain Men and the battle of King’s Mountain, a tide-turning battle in the American Revolution. “Men of Their Time” is an exploration of white-Cherokee relationships from early contact through the time of the Revolution.
Although not well known to the outside world, the stories recounted in Teller Tales are cornerstones in the heritage of the Appalachian region and of American history. In ways that will appeal to young and old alike, Jo Carson’s irreverent telling will broaden the audience and the understanding for the stories of native Americans, settlers, explorers, and revolutionaries of early America.
Both stories in this book are set in East Tennessee in the mid-eighteenth century and share certain characters. The first narrative, “What Sweet Lips Can Do,” recounts the story of the Overmountain Men and the battle of King’s Mountain, a tide-turning battle in the American Revolution. “Men of Their Time” is an exploration of white-Cherokee relationships from early contact through the time of the Revolution.
Although not well known to the outside world, the stories recounted in Teller Tales are cornerstones in the heritage of the Appalachian region and of American history. In ways that will appeal to young and old alike, Jo Carson’s irreverent telling will broaden the audience and the understanding for the stories of native Americans, settlers, explorers, and revolutionaries of early America.
[more]
Tellico Archaeology Rev Ed
12000 Years Native American History
Jefferson Chapman
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
This book is an updated edition of Jefferson Chapman's 1985 account of one of the most productive and significant research efforts in the eastern United States. For fourteen years (1967–1981), archaeologists from the University of Tennessee conducted excavations and surveys in the Little Tennessee River Valley, which was being inundated by the TVA's creation of the Tellico Reservoir. The project produced a wealth of new information about more than 12,000 years of Native American history in the region.
This revision retains the full text and illustrations of the original edition, with its compelling descriptions of ancient ways of life and the archaeological detective work that was done to obtain that knowledge. The new material, contained in a postscript, summarizes the discoveries, research methods, and other developments that have, over the past ten years, further enhanced our knowledge of the Native Americans who occupied the area. Included, for example, are details about some fascinating new techniques for dating human remains, as well as discussions of burial practices, native crops, new archaeological laws, and the "Bat Creek Stone," a controversial artifact that, according to some claims, gives evidence of migrations of Mediterranean peoples to the New World during Roman times.
The Author: Jefferson Chapman is director of the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a research associate professor in the department of anthropology.
This revision retains the full text and illustrations of the original edition, with its compelling descriptions of ancient ways of life and the archaeological detective work that was done to obtain that knowledge. The new material, contained in a postscript, summarizes the discoveries, research methods, and other developments that have, over the past ten years, further enhanced our knowledge of the Native Americans who occupied the area. Included, for example, are details about some fascinating new techniques for dating human remains, as well as discussions of burial practices, native crops, new archaeological laws, and the "Bat Creek Stone," a controversial artifact that, according to some claims, gives evidence of migrations of Mediterranean peoples to the New World during Roman times.
The Author: Jefferson Chapman is director of the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a research associate professor in the department of anthropology.
[more]
Tennesseans & Their History
Paul H. Bergeron
University of Tennessee Press, 1999
The history of Tennessee is full of dramatic episodes and colorful characters that give the Volunteer State a major place in the American saga. From the bloody battle of Shiloh in 1862 to the Dayton "monkey trial" of 1925 to the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis in 1968, Tennessee has been the locale for many of America's most important events.
This new book presents a synthesis of Tennessee history from earliest times to the present. Striking a balance of social, economic, and political perspectives, it moves from frontier times to early statehood, antebellum society through the Civil War to Reconstruction, then establishes Tennessee's place in the New South and in modern times.
Full coverage is devoted to the Civil Rights era and to events in the later years of this century, including environmental issues. The text deals honestly with slavery and segregation and also corrects shortcomings of previous works by placing the state's history in the context of national issues and events within the South.
The authors introduce readers to famous personages like Andrew Jackson and Austin Peay, often using quotations to give them voice. They also tell stories of ordinary people and their lives to show how they are an integral part of history. Sidebars throughout the text highlight stories of particular interest, and reading lists at the end of chapters further enhance the text's utility.
Tennesseans and Their History was written for students needing a basic introduction to state history and to general readers looking for a lively introduction to Tennessee's past. Written to be entertaining as well as instructive, it makes the state's history relevant to a new generation of Tennesseans.
The Authors: Paul H. Bergerson is professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the editor of The Papers of Andrew Johnson.
Stephen V. Ash is associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of Middle Tennessee Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South.
Jeanette Keith is associate professor of history at Bloomsburg University and the author of Country People in the New South: Tennessee's Upper Cumberland.
This new book presents a synthesis of Tennessee history from earliest times to the present. Striking a balance of social, economic, and political perspectives, it moves from frontier times to early statehood, antebellum society through the Civil War to Reconstruction, then establishes Tennessee's place in the New South and in modern times.
Full coverage is devoted to the Civil Rights era and to events in the later years of this century, including environmental issues. The text deals honestly with slavery and segregation and also corrects shortcomings of previous works by placing the state's history in the context of national issues and events within the South.
The authors introduce readers to famous personages like Andrew Jackson and Austin Peay, often using quotations to give them voice. They also tell stories of ordinary people and their lives to show how they are an integral part of history. Sidebars throughout the text highlight stories of particular interest, and reading lists at the end of chapters further enhance the text's utility.
Tennesseans and Their History was written for students needing a basic introduction to state history and to general readers looking for a lively introduction to Tennessee's past. Written to be entertaining as well as instructive, it makes the state's history relevant to a new generation of Tennesseans.
The Authors: Paul H. Bergerson is professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the editor of The Papers of Andrew Johnson.
Stephen V. Ash is associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of Middle Tennessee Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South.
Jeanette Keith is associate professor of history at Bloomsburg University and the author of Country People in the New South: Tennessee's Upper Cumberland.
[more]
Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815
Andrew Jackson, the Creek War, and the Battle of New Orleans
Tom Kanon
University of Alabama Press, 2014
Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815 by Tom Kanon tells the often forgotten story of the central role citizens and soldiers from Tennessee played in the Creek War in Alabama and War of 1812.
Although frequently discussed as separate military conflicts, the War of 1812 against Great Britain and the Creek War against Native Americans in the territory that would become Alabama were part of the same forceful projection of growing American power. Success in both wars won for America security against attack from abroad and vast tracks of new land in “the Old Southwest.” In Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, Tom Kanon explains the role Tennesseans played in these changes and how they remade the south.
Because it was a landlocked frontier state, Tennessee’s economy and security depended heavily upon the river systems that traversed the region; some, like the Tennessee River, flowed south out of the state and into Native American lands. Tennesseans of the period perceived that gaining mastery of these waterways formed an urgent part of their economic survival and stability.
The culmination of fifteen years’ research, Kanon’s work draws on state archives, primary sources, and eyewitness accounts, bringing the information in these materials together for first time. Not only does he narrate the military campaigns at the heart of the young nation’s expansion, but he also deftly recalls the economic and social pressures and opportunities that encouraged large numbers of Tennesseans to leave home and fight. He expertly weaves these themes into a cohesive narrative that culminates in the vivid military victories of the War of 1812, the Creek War, and the legendary Battle of New Orleans—the victory that catapulted Tennessee’s citizen-soldier Andrew Jackson to the presidency.
Expounding on the social roles and conditions of women, slaves, minorities, and Native Americans in Tennessee, Kanon also brings into focus the key idea of the “home front” in the minds of Tennesseans doing battle in Alabama and beyond. Kanon shows how the goal of creating, strengthening, and maintaining an ordered society permeated the choices and actions of the American elites on the frontiers of the young nation.
Much more than a history of Tennesseans or the battles they fought in Alabama, Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, is the gripping story of a pivotal turning point in the history of the young American republic.
Although frequently discussed as separate military conflicts, the War of 1812 against Great Britain and the Creek War against Native Americans in the territory that would become Alabama were part of the same forceful projection of growing American power. Success in both wars won for America security against attack from abroad and vast tracks of new land in “the Old Southwest.” In Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, Tom Kanon explains the role Tennesseans played in these changes and how they remade the south.
Because it was a landlocked frontier state, Tennessee’s economy and security depended heavily upon the river systems that traversed the region; some, like the Tennessee River, flowed south out of the state and into Native American lands. Tennesseans of the period perceived that gaining mastery of these waterways formed an urgent part of their economic survival and stability.
The culmination of fifteen years’ research, Kanon’s work draws on state archives, primary sources, and eyewitness accounts, bringing the information in these materials together for first time. Not only does he narrate the military campaigns at the heart of the young nation’s expansion, but he also deftly recalls the economic and social pressures and opportunities that encouraged large numbers of Tennesseans to leave home and fight. He expertly weaves these themes into a cohesive narrative that culminates in the vivid military victories of the War of 1812, the Creek War, and the legendary Battle of New Orleans—the victory that catapulted Tennessee’s citizen-soldier Andrew Jackson to the presidency.
Expounding on the social roles and conditions of women, slaves, minorities, and Native Americans in Tennessee, Kanon also brings into focus the key idea of the “home front” in the minds of Tennesseans doing battle in Alabama and beyond. Kanon shows how the goal of creating, strengthening, and maintaining an ordered society permeated the choices and actions of the American elites on the frontiers of the young nation.
Much more than a history of Tennesseans or the battles they fought in Alabama, Tennesseans at War, 1812–1815, is the gripping story of a pivotal turning point in the history of the young American republic.
[more]
The Tennessee Campaign of 1864
Edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear
Southern Illinois University Press, 2016
Few American Civil War operations matched the controversy, intensity, and bloodshed of Confederate general John Bell Hood’s ill-fated 1864 campaign against Union forces in Tennessee. In the first-ever anthology on the subject, The Tennessee Campaign of 1864, edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear, fourteen prominent historians and emerging scholars examine the three-month operation, covering the battles of Allatoona, Spring Hill, and Franklin, as well as the decimation of Hood’s army at Nashville.
Contributors explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, where the Confederacy suffered a disastrous blow. An exciting inclusion is the diary of Confederate major general Patrick R. Cleburne, which covers the first phase of the campaign. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville.
Canvassing both military and social history, this well-researched volume offers new, illuminating perspectives while furthering long-running debates on more familiar topics. These in-depth essays provide an expert appraisal of one of the most brutal and notorious campaigns in Civil War history.
Contributors explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, where the Confederacy suffered a disastrous blow. An exciting inclusion is the diary of Confederate major general Patrick R. Cleburne, which covers the first phase of the campaign. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville.
Canvassing both military and social history, this well-researched volume offers new, illuminating perspectives while furthering long-running debates on more familiar topics. These in-depth essays provide an expert appraisal of one of the most brutal and notorious campaigns in Civil War history.
[more]
The Tennessee, Green, and Lower Ohio Rivers Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore
Clarence Bloomfield Moore, edited and introduced by Richard R. Polhemus
University of Alabama Press, 2002
This richly illustrated book is the eighth of nine Classics in Southeastern Archaeology volumes based on Moore's investigations along the waterways of eastern North America.
This oversized reprint volume presents original materials from Moore's northernmost expeditions conducted in the early 1900s as he surveyed areas of potential archaeological interest in the southeastern United States. Some of the sites he found were later targeted for major excavations during the days of the WPA/CCC. Many National Register Historic Sites are today located along the rivers he explored in this work. In many cases, however, Moore's report documents sites since destroyed by river action or by lake impoundments behind hydroelectric dams or by looters.
As with all of Moore's other investigations, his thorough documentation and collaboration with other scholars advanced understanding of aboriginal peoples and fueled debate among the experts. For instance, more than 296 burials were recovered from Indian Knoll on the Green River in Kentucky. Some graves included ceremonially "killed" artifacts, dogs buried with both adults and children, and exotic materials leading to speculations concerning origins, usage, and trade networks. Stone box graves were widespread and somewhat exclusive to this area, giving rise to early assumptions regarding kinship between scattered modern Indian tribes.
Richard Polhemus has compiled a comprehensive inventory of Moore's work in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky and written a concise introduction to place the work in context. In so doing, he has made available to contemporary scholars of history, archaeology, and anthropology a trove of resource material on one of the most archaeologically rich and artifact-diverse regions in the nation.
[more]
Tennessee Log Buildings
A Folk Tradition
John B. Rehder
University of Tennessee Press, 2012
Drawing on more than four decades of research, Tennessee Log Buildings examines one of the Volunteer State’s most precious—and fast-disappearing—traditions. From the pioneer era through the mid–twentieth century, folk builders in Tennessee used logs to construct cabins, barns, other outbuildings, schools, and churches. In warm, accessible prose that often makes this deeply researched work read like guidebook, John Rehder explores the varied styles and architectural characteristics of these fascinating structures, including their floor plans, the types of timber used, and the different notches that were cut into the logs to secure the structures.
Profusely illustrated with over one hundred images, Tennessee Log Houses traces the evolution of log houses from one-room (or single-pen) dwellings to more elaborate homes of various types, such as saddlebags, Cumberland houses, dogtrots, and two-story I-houses. Rehder discusses the historic settlement patterns and building traditions that led to this variety of house types and identifies their particular occurrences throughout the state by drawing on surveys conducted in forty-two counties by teams working for the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC). Similarly, he explores disparate barn and outbuilding types, including the distinctive cantilever barns that are found predominantly in East Tennessee. Sprinkled throughout the book are engaging anecdotes that convey just what it is like to conduct field research in remote rural areas. Rehder also describes in detail a number of the state’s exceptional log places, among them Wynnewood, an enormous structure in Middle Tennessee which dates back to the early nineteenth century and which suffered severe tornado damage in 2008.
As the author notes, many of the buildings originally identified in the THC investigations have now vanished completely while others are in serious disrepair. Thus, this book not only offers an instructive and delightful look at a key part of Tennessee’s heritage but also makes an eloquent plea for its preservation.
Until his death in 2011, JOHN B. REHDER was a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He first joined the UT faculty in 1967. He was the author of Appalachian Folkways, which won the Pioneer America Society’s Fred B. Kniffen Book Award in 2004, and Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape, which won the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2000 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award.
Profusely illustrated with over one hundred images, Tennessee Log Houses traces the evolution of log houses from one-room (or single-pen) dwellings to more elaborate homes of various types, such as saddlebags, Cumberland houses, dogtrots, and two-story I-houses. Rehder discusses the historic settlement patterns and building traditions that led to this variety of house types and identifies their particular occurrences throughout the state by drawing on surveys conducted in forty-two counties by teams working for the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC). Similarly, he explores disparate barn and outbuilding types, including the distinctive cantilever barns that are found predominantly in East Tennessee. Sprinkled throughout the book are engaging anecdotes that convey just what it is like to conduct field research in remote rural areas. Rehder also describes in detail a number of the state’s exceptional log places, among them Wynnewood, an enormous structure in Middle Tennessee which dates back to the early nineteenth century and which suffered severe tornado damage in 2008.
As the author notes, many of the buildings originally identified in the THC investigations have now vanished completely while others are in serious disrepair. Thus, this book not only offers an instructive and delightful look at a key part of Tennessee’s heritage but also makes an eloquent plea for its preservation.
Until his death in 2011, JOHN B. REHDER was a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He first joined the UT faculty in 1967. He was the author of Appalachian Folkways, which won the Pioneer America Society’s Fred B. Kniffen Book Award in 2004, and Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape, which won the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2000 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award.
[more]
Tennessee Tragedies
Natural, Technological, and Societal Disasters in the Volunteer State
Allen R. Coggins
University of Tennessee Press, 2011
A one-of-a-kind reference book, Tennessee Tragedies examines a wide variety of disasters that have occurred in the Volunteer State over the past several centuries. Intended for both general readers and emergency management professionals, it covers natural disasters such as floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes; technological events such as explosions, transportation wrecks, and structure fires; and societal incidents including labor strikes, political violence, lynchings, and other hate crimes.
At the center of the book are descriptive accounts of 150 of the state’s most severe events. These range from smallpox epidemics in the eighteenth century to the epic floods of 1936–37, from the Sultana riverboat disaster of 1865 (the worst inland marine accident in U.S. history) to the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Included as well are stories of plane crashes, train wrecks, droughts, economic panics, and race riots. An extensive chronology provides further details on more than 900 incidents, the most complete listing ever compiled for a single state. The book’s introduction examines topics that include our fascination with such tragedies; major causes of death, injury, and destruction; and the daunting problems of producing accurate accountings of a disaster’s effects, whether in numbers of dead and injured or of economic impact. Among the other features are a comprehensive glossary that defines various technical terms and concepts and tables illustrating earthquake, drought, disease, and tornado intensity scales.
A work of great historical interest that brings together for the first time an impressive array of information,Tennessee Tragedies will prove exceptionally useful for those who must respond to inevitable future disasters.
[more]
Tennessee Women in the Progressive Era
Toward the Public Sphere in the New South
Mary A. Evins
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Discussions of Tennessee women’s history during the Progressive Era tend to focus narrowly on the critical issue of suffrage and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. While the achievement of Tennessee’s suffragists remains a feather in the state’s historic cap—pushing the legislature to cast the votes that settled the issue for the nation—reform-minded Tennessee women in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries participated in a wide range of other public-sphere activities. The first exploration of the work and lives of Progressive Era Tennessee women beyond their involvement in the battle for the right to vote, this pioneering compilation provides a fuller portrait of the work undertaken by these bold activists to improve the lives of their fellow citizens.
Ranging in subject matter from the role of women’s missionary organizations and efforts to end lynching to the challenges of agricultural reform and the development of stronger educational institutions, these essays consider a wide variety of reform efforts that engaged progressive women in Tennessee before, during, and after the suffrage movement. Throughout, the contributors emphasize the influence of religion on women’s reform efforts and examine the ways in which these women expanded their public roles while at the same time professing loyalty to more traditional models of womanhood. In demonstrating Tennessee women’s engagement with politics long before they had the vote, ran for office, or served on juries, these essays also support the argument that a broader definition of “politics” permits a fuller incorporation of women’s public activities into U.S. political history.
By focusing on the actual work reform-minded women performed, whether paid employment or volunteer efforts, this anthology illustrates myriad ways in which these individuals engaged their communities and reveals the motivations that drove them to improve society. Marshaling precise and detailed evidence that illuminates the meanings of progressivism to Tennessee’s female activists, the essays in this valuable compendium connect Tennessee women to the larger movements for reform that dominated the early-twentieth-century American experience.
Mary A. Evins is an associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.
Ranging in subject matter from the role of women’s missionary organizations and efforts to end lynching to the challenges of agricultural reform and the development of stronger educational institutions, these essays consider a wide variety of reform efforts that engaged progressive women in Tennessee before, during, and after the suffrage movement. Throughout, the contributors emphasize the influence of religion on women’s reform efforts and examine the ways in which these women expanded their public roles while at the same time professing loyalty to more traditional models of womanhood. In demonstrating Tennessee women’s engagement with politics long before they had the vote, ran for office, or served on juries, these essays also support the argument that a broader definition of “politics” permits a fuller incorporation of women’s public activities into U.S. political history.
By focusing on the actual work reform-minded women performed, whether paid employment or volunteer efforts, this anthology illustrates myriad ways in which these individuals engaged their communities and reveals the motivations that drove them to improve society. Marshaling precise and detailed evidence that illuminates the meanings of progressivism to Tennessee’s female activists, the essays in this valuable compendium connect Tennessee women to the larger movements for reform that dominated the early-twentieth-century American experience.
Mary A. Evins is an associate professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University.
[more]
Tennessee'S Forgotten Warriors
Frank Cheatham His Confederate Division
Christopher Losson
University of Tennessee Press, 1990
Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey
Commemorative Edition
Kathryn Tucker Windham
University of Alabama Press, 2016
In Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey, beloved and best-selling folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham presents a spine-tingling collection of Tennessee’s eeriest ghost tales. Accompanied by her faithful companion, Jeffrey, a friendly spirit who resided in her home, Windham traveled from the mysterious muds of Memphis to the haunted hollow’s of east Tennessee to collect the spookiest collection of Volunteer State revenants ever written.
In these perennial favorites, Windham captures the gentle folk humor of native Tennesseans as well as fascinating facts about the state’s rich history. In “The Dark Legend,” Windham recounts the story of explorer Merriwether Lewis, who met an untimely end on the Natchez Trace 1809 and whose spirit, it is said, still treads through Tennessee’s forests. Windham also visits central Tennessee’s Chapel Hill, where people who know the town say those who stand on the train tracks on dark, lonely nights can often see a disembodied light floating along the tracks. Neighbors say it’s the ghost of a headless flagman who returns to cavort with night-time guests.
High in Tennessee’s Appalachian mountains, Windham encounters Martin, the phantom fiddler of Johnson County. Legend has it that in life Martin’s musical skills so mesmerized the snakes of the Stone Mountains that they would slither from their dens to listen tamely to his fiddling. Intrepid visitors to the rocky tops of northeast Tennessee’s mountains say you can still hear Martin’s ghost fiddling in the hollows.
This handsome, new commemorative hardback edition returns Windham’s suspenseful classic to its original keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author’s children.
In these perennial favorites, Windham captures the gentle folk humor of native Tennesseans as well as fascinating facts about the state’s rich history. In “The Dark Legend,” Windham recounts the story of explorer Merriwether Lewis, who met an untimely end on the Natchez Trace 1809 and whose spirit, it is said, still treads through Tennessee’s forests. Windham also visits central Tennessee’s Chapel Hill, where people who know the town say those who stand on the train tracks on dark, lonely nights can often see a disembodied light floating along the tracks. Neighbors say it’s the ghost of a headless flagman who returns to cavort with night-time guests.
High in Tennessee’s Appalachian mountains, Windham encounters Martin, the phantom fiddler of Johnson County. Legend has it that in life Martin’s musical skills so mesmerized the snakes of the Stone Mountains that they would slither from their dens to listen tamely to his fiddling. Intrepid visitors to the rocky tops of northeast Tennessee’s mountains say you can still hear Martin’s ghost fiddling in the hollows.
This handsome, new commemorative hardback edition returns Windham’s suspenseful classic to its original keepsake quality and includes a new afterword by the author’s children.
[more]
This Is Our Land
Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century
Ferguson, Cody
Rutgers University Press, 2015
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the environmental movement experienced a quiet revolution. In This is Our Land, Cody Ferguson documents this little-noted change as he describes the efforts of three representative grassroots groups—in Montana, Arizona, and Tennessee—revealing how quite ordinary citizens fought to solve environmental problems.
Here are stories of common people who, confronting environmental threats to the health and safety of their families and communities, bonded together to protect their interests. These stories include successes and failures as citizens learned how to participate in their democracy and redefined what participation meant. Equally important, Ferguson describes how several laws passed in the seventies—such as the National Environmental Policy Act—gave citizens the opportunity and the tools to fight for the environment. These laws gave people a say in the decisions that affected the world around them, including the air they breathed, the water they drank, the land on which they made their living, and the communities they called home. Moreover, Ferguson shows that through their experiences over the course of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, these citizen activists broadened their understanding of “this is our land” to mean “this is our community, this is our country, this is our democracy, and this is our planet.” As they did, they redefined political participation and expanded the ability of citizens to shape their world.
Challenging us to see activism in a new way, This is Our Land recovers the stories of often-unseen citizens who have been vitally important to the environmental movement. It will inspire readers to confront environmental threats and make our world a safer, more just, and more sustainable place to live.
[more]
To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond
Stabilization and Reconstruction in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1864–1866
Benjamin Franklin Cooling
University of Tennessee Press, 2011
“Benjamin Franklin Cooling has produced a triumphant third volume to his definitive study of Tennessee and Kentucky in the Civil War. Like his first two volumes, this one perfectly integrates the home front and battlefield, demonstrating that civilians were continually embroiled in the war in intense ways comparable to and often surpassing the violence experienced by soldiers on the battlefield. The impacts of armies, guerrillas, and other military forces on civilians was continual, terrifying, and brutal in nearly all parts of the Confederacy’s Heartland.” —T. Michael Parrish, Linden G. Bowers Professor of American History, Baylor University
“Cooling’s scholarship is indeed sound and based on extensive research in a variety of original sources that range from manuscript collections to newspapers, with an exhaustive list of secondary sources. His work represents the first new interpretations of this important part of the war in decades.” —Archie P. McDonald, Regent’s Professor and Community Liaison, Stephen F. Austin State University
In two preceding volumes, Forts Henry and Donelson and Fort Donelson’s Legacy, Benjamin Franklin Cooling offered a sweeping portrayal of war and society in the upper southern heartland of Kentucky and Tennessee during the first two and a half years of the Civil War. This book continues that saga as Cooling probes the profound turmoil—on the battlefield, on the home front, within the shadow areas where lawlessness reigned—that defined the war in the region as it ground to its close.
By 1864 neither the Union’s survival nor the South’s independence was any more apparent than at the beginning of the war. The grand strategies of both sides were still evolving, and Tennessee and Kentucky were often at the cusp of that work. With his customary command of myriad sources, Cooling examines the heartland conflict in all its aspects: the Confederate cavalry raids and Union counteroffensives; the harsh and punitive Reconstruction policies that were met with banditry and brutal guerrilla actions; the disparate political, economic, and sociocultural upheavals; the ever-growing war weariness of the divided populations; and the climactic battles of Franklin and Nashville that ended the Confederacy’s hopes in the Western Theater. Especially notable in this volume is Cooling’s use of the latest concepts of “hybrid” or “compound war” that national security experts have applied to the twenty-first-century wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—a mode of analysis that explores how catastrophic terrorism and disruptive lawlessness mix with traditional combat and irregular operations to form a new kind of warfare. Not only are such concepts relevant to the historical study of the Civil War in the heartland, Cooling suggests, but by the same token, their illumination of historical events can only enrich the ways in which policymakers view present-day conflicts.
In chronicling Tennessee and Kentucky’s final rite of passage from war to peace, To the Battles of Franklin and Nashville and Beyond is in every way a major contribution to Civil War literature by a masterful historian.
[more]
Tom Ashley Sam Tom Ashley, Sam McGee, Bukka White
Tennessee Traditional Singers
Thomas G. Burton
University of Tennessee Press, 1981
Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie
Thomas J. Cypert, edited and with an introduction by Margaret M. Storey
University of Alabama Press, 2011
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Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie highlights in emotional detail the local tensions between Unionists and Confederates in the Civil War South and offers a rare first-person account of the guerrilla war that devastated Western Tennessee.
Thomas Jefferson Cypert (1827-1918) was a staunch Union man of Wayne County, Tennessee. In 1863, he helped organize the Second Tennessee Mounted Infantry, a regiment of loyalist Southerners enlisted to combat Confederate cavalry in West Tennessee and Northern Alabama. Tried Men and True is Cypert’s memoir of his time as Captain of Company A, including his capture by Confederate cavalry and subsequent daring escape, in which he was aided by local Union sympathizers and slaves.
After the Civil War, Cypert served two terms in the Tennessee State Senate, one of them during the heated first years of Reconstruction, when Tennessee disenfranchised former rebels and attempted to establish Unionist Republican rule in the state. Cypert clearly wrote his memoir to defend Unionism, condemn secession and rebellion, and support loyalists’ claims for post-war power through an account of their wartime sacrifices. Never before published, the manuscript has been preserved in nearly perfect condition by Cypert’s descendants over the generations. This book is a remarkable and engagingly written account of resistance to the Confederacy by a group of southwestern Tennessee loyalists.
[more]
Valleys of the Shadow
The Memoir of Confederate Captain Reuben G. Clark
Willene B. Clark
University of Tennessee Press, 1994
Valleys of the Shadow is the previously unpublished account of Captain Reuben Clark’s first-hand experiences as a Confederate officer, a prisoner of war, and a post war civilian living in a conquered state.
Captain Clark was a twenty-seven-year-old Knoxville businessman when the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861. Like many southern gentlemen, Clark was opposed to secession but could not desert his family and friends. Enlisting as a first lieutenant in the Confederacy’s Third Tennessee Infantry Regiment, he spent his first night as a soldier on the bloody battlefield of Manasses. Clark’s recollections of Manasses and the battles and skirmishes that followed pinpoint his regiment’s activities in previously undocumented areas while providing valuable analyses of battles from a participant’s point of view and discussing the irony many soldiers felt when battle pitted them against men they had known before the war in business, politics, and society.
Captured after the battle of Morristown in the fall of 1864, Clark was jailed in Knoxville, then under Federal control. His account of the eight months he spent as a prisoner—his harsh treatment, a near-fatal illness, the false accusations of traitorous activities—offer a detailed description of the physical and legal battles of a Confederate prisoner of war fighting to obtain his freedom. Clark’s post war experiences relate his struggles as a former Rebel living in a conquered state, reflecting the deeply divided loyalties of East Tennessee that continued for years after the war’s end.
This first book in the Voices of the Civil War series shares the story of a man who remained sensible of his kinship with those he was forced to call his enemies. Written a quarter-century after the war began, Clark's memories vividly bring to life the tragedy that was the Civil War.
Willene B. Clark, a granddaughter of Captain Clark, is a professor of art history at Marlboro College, Marlboro, Vermont.
Captain Clark was a twenty-seven-year-old Knoxville businessman when the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861. Like many southern gentlemen, Clark was opposed to secession but could not desert his family and friends. Enlisting as a first lieutenant in the Confederacy’s Third Tennessee Infantry Regiment, he spent his first night as a soldier on the bloody battlefield of Manasses. Clark’s recollections of Manasses and the battles and skirmishes that followed pinpoint his regiment’s activities in previously undocumented areas while providing valuable analyses of battles from a participant’s point of view and discussing the irony many soldiers felt when battle pitted them against men they had known before the war in business, politics, and society.
Captured after the battle of Morristown in the fall of 1864, Clark was jailed in Knoxville, then under Federal control. His account of the eight months he spent as a prisoner—his harsh treatment, a near-fatal illness, the false accusations of traitorous activities—offer a detailed description of the physical and legal battles of a Confederate prisoner of war fighting to obtain his freedom. Clark’s post war experiences relate his struggles as a former Rebel living in a conquered state, reflecting the deeply divided loyalties of East Tennessee that continued for years after the war’s end.
This first book in the Voices of the Civil War series shares the story of a man who remained sensible of his kinship with those he was forced to call his enemies. Written a quarter-century after the war began, Clark's memories vividly bring to life the tragedy that was the Civil War.
Willene B. Clark, a granddaughter of Captain Clark, is a professor of art history at Marlboro College, Marlboro, Vermont.
[more]
Votes For Women
Woman Suffrage Movement
Marjorie Spruill Wheeler
University of Tennessee Press, 1995
Where No Flag Flies
Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance
Mark Royden Winchell
University of Missouri Press, 2000
Donald Davidson (1893-1968) may well be the most unjustifiably neglected figure in twentieth-century southern literature. One of the most important poets of the Fugitive movement, he also produced a substantial body of literary criticism, the libretto for an American folk opera, a widely used composition textbook, and the recently discovered novel The Big Ballad Jamboree. As a social and political activist, Davidson had significant impact on conservative thought in this century, imfluencing important scholars from Cleanth Brooks to M. E. Bradford.
Despite these accomplishments, Donald Davidson has received little critical attention from either the literary or the southern scholarly community. Where No Flag Flies is Mark Royden Winchell's redress of this critical disservice. A comprehensive intellectual biography of Davidson, this seminal work offers a complete narrative of Davidson's life with all of its triumphs and losses, frustrations and fulfillments.
Winchell provides the reader with more than a simple study of a man and his achievements; he paints a complete portrait of the times in which Davidson published, from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Davidson was more directly involved in political and social activities than most writers of his generation, and Winchell provides the context, both literary and historical, in which Davidson's opinions and works developed. At the same time, Winchell offers detailed evaluations of Davidson's poetry, fiction, historical writings, and essays.
Drawing upon a wealth of previously unpublished archival material, including Davidson's letters and diary, Where No Flag Flies provides unique access to one of the most original minds of the twentieth-century South. Donald Davidson may not have achieved the recognition he deserved, but this remarkable biography finally makes it possible for a considerable literary audience to discover his true achievement.
[more]
Wilderness Trails
Tennessees Cherokee National Forest
William H. Skelton
University of Tennessee Press, 1992
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