“The reason I travel and explore the outdoors is simple,” writes Johnny Molloy, “the world is a beautiful place!” And Molloy would know: he has backpacked more than 2,500 nights in forty states. It is this experience—much of it garnered in his home state of Tennessee—combined with his extensive production of guidebooks spanning activities from hiking and camping to paddling and bicycling, that enabled him to produce Backpacking Tennessee: Overnight Trail Adventures from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains.

Complete with directions, distances, descriptions, and maps, Backpacking Tennessee is divided into four sections that together outline forty overnight hikes across West Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, the Cumberland Plateau, and East Tennessee and the Appalachian Mountains. The trails Molloy has chosen to highlight are a mix of well-known hikes and lesser-known areas, ranging in distance and difficulty for both novice hikers and experienced backpackers. Woven throughout the trail descriptions are comments on scenery, notes about safety, and historical information that help readers get a true feel for each hike. To round out his comprehensive guide, Molloy also includes ratings, 1–5, on the family- and dog-friendliness of each trail—an especially helpful feature for readers bringing loved ones along.

From the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Cherokee National Forest to Big South Fork and Land Between the Lakes, Tennessee offers thousands of miles of trails for adventurers looking to explore. For budding outdoor enthusiasts and experienced backpackers alike, Backpacking Tennessee answers the timeless question: where do we go next?

Bearing the Torch stands as a comprehensive history of the University of Tennessee, replete with anecdotes and vignettes of interest to anyone interested in UT, from the administrators and chancellors to students and alums, and even to the Vols fans whose familiarity with the school comes mainly from the sports page. It is also a biography of a school whose history reflects that of its state and its nation. The institution that began as Blount College in 1794 in a frontier village called Knoxville exemplifies the relationship between education and American history.

This is the first scholarly history of UT since 1984. T. R. C. Hutton not only provides a much-needed update, but also seeks to present a social history of the university, fully integrating historical context and showing how the volume’s central “character”—the university itself—reflects historical themes and concerns. For example, Hutton shows how the school’s development was hampered in the early nineteenth century by stingy state funding (a theme that also appears in subsequent decades) and Jacksonian fears that publicly funded higher education equaled elite privilege. The institution nearly disappeared as the Civil War raged in a divided region, but then it flourished thanks to policies that never could have happened without the war. In the twentieth century, students embraced dramatic social changes as the university wrestled with race, gender, and other important issues. In the Cold War era, UT became a successful research institution and entered into a deep partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratories that persists to this day. All the while UT athletics experienced the highs of national championships and the lows of lawsuits and losing seasons. UT is a university with a universe of historical experiences.

The University of Tennessee’s story has always been defined by inclusion and exclusion, and the school has triumphed when it practiced the former and failed when it took part in the latter. Bearing the Torch traces that ongoing process, richly detailing the University’s contributions to what one president, Joseph Estabrook, called the “diffusion of knowledge among the people.”

Apparently, slumber parties in the mid-South 1970s were plied with a strange ritual. At midnight attendees would gather before a mirror and chant “I don’t believe in the Bell Witch” three times to see if the legendary spook would appear alongside their own reflections—a practice that echoes the “Bloody Mary” pattern following the execution of Mary Queen of Scots centuries ago. But that small circuit of preteen gatherings was neither the beginning nor the end of the Bell Witch’s travels. Indeed, the legend of the haint who terrorized the Bell family of Adams, Tennessee, is one of the best-known pieces of folklore in American storytelling—featured around the globe in popular-culture references as varied as a 1930s radio skit and a 1980s song from a Danish heavy metal band. Legend has it that “Old Kate” was investigated even by the likes of future president Andrew Jackson, who was reported to have said, “I would rather fight the British ten times over than to ever face the Bell Witch again.”

While dozens of books and articles have thoroughly analyzed this intriguing tale, this book breaks new ground by exploring the oral traditions associated with the poltergeist and demonstrating her regional, national, and even international sweep. Author Rick Gregory details the ways the narrative mirrors other legends with similar themes and examines the modern proliferation of the story via contemporary digital media. The Bell Witch in Myth and Memory ultimately explores what people believe and why they believe what they cannot explicitly prove—and, more particularly, why for two hundred years so many have sworn by the reality of the Bell Witch. In this highly engaging study, Rick Gregory not only sheds light on Tennessee’s vibrant oral history tradition but also provides insight into the enduring, worldwide phenomenon that is folklore.

While black men and women have played important roles in Tennessee’s growth and history; slavery, caste, and segregation have forced them to live apart and to create a separate history. In this historical analysis, Lester Lamon offers an understanding of the history of black Tennesseans, recognizing that they have been both a part of and apart from the developments affecting the dominant white population of the state. The different economic priorities, political loyalties, and racial populations evident in the three “Grand Divisions” of the state have created superficial differences in the historical experiences of blacks in the three regions. Intrastate competition has reinforced these sectional differences, but a common factor found in the black experience has been a racial “givenness”—the idea that blacks should not expect equality or free association with whites. Tennessee’s black history is not one of a surrender to racial pressure, but, instead, is a story of courage, sacrifice, frustration, and dreams of freedom, equality, and respect for human dignity.

Blacks in Tennessee provides a necessary and culturally enriching addition to the traditional history of the state.

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.

What effect have twenty-five years of school desegregation had on Nashville? Richard A. Pride and J. David Woodard evaluate the city’s efforts at integration and systematically examine the crucial issues involved. They argue that the controversy has little to do with costs, bus routes, or achievement test scores. Instead, they claim, it strikes at fundamental cultural issues.

Nashville’s white citizens, the authors observe, resisted busing from the beginning. After nine years’ experience, blacks had become equally hostile to the notion, arguing that they, and they alone, bore the burden. Their schools had been closed, their offspring had had to travel farther for instruction, and their institutions and culture had been disrupted. Blacks rejected assimilation, demanding schools in their neighborhoods in which their children would predominate and would be supervised and taught by people of their own race.

A federal judge heard the case. He agreed that the costs of the experiment had outweighed the benefits. In 1980, in the first such decision made in the nation, he ordered an end to busing. His opinion explained his concern that busing was creating two school systems – one private, white, and middle class, one public, black, and poor. The legal impact of the case was blunted when, on appeal, the Sixth Circuit Court ordered busing be re-established in Nashville.