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16 books match the query 'Nashville (Tenn.)'
Classical Nashville
Athens of the SouthChristine M. Kreyling
Vanderbilt University Press, 1996
Nashville has been many things: frontier town, Civil War battleground, New South mecca, and Music City, U.S.A. It is headquarters for several religious denominations, and also the home of some of the largest insurance, healthcare, and publishing concerns in the country. Located culturally as well as geographically between North and South, East and West, Nashville is centered in a web of often-competing contradictions.
One binding image of civic identity, however, has been consistent through all of Nashville's history: the classical Greek and Roman ideals of education, art, and community participation that early on led to the city's sobriquet, "Athens of the West," and eventually, with the settling of the territory beyond the Mississippi River, the "Athens of the South."
Illustrated with nearly a hundred archival and contemporary photographs, Classical Nashville shows how Nashville earned that appellation through its adoption of classical metaphors in several areas: its educational and literary history, from the first academies through the establishment of the Fugitive movement at Vanderbilt; the classicism of the city's public architecture, including its Capitol and legislative buildings; the evolution of neoclassicism in homes and private buildings; and the history and current state of the Parthenon, the ultimate symbol of classical Nashville, replete with the awe-inspiring 42-foot statue of Athena by sculptor Alan LeQuire.
Perhaps Nashville author John Egerton best captures the essence of this modern city with its solid roots in the past. He places Nashville "somewhere between the 'Athens of the West' and 'Music City, U.S.A.,' between the grime of a railroad town and the glitz of Opryland, between Robert Penn Warren and Robert Altman." Nashville's classical identifications have always been forward-looking, rather than antiquarian: ambitious, democratic, entrepreneurial, and culturally substantive. Classical Nashville celebrates the continuation of classical ideals in present-day Nashville, ideals that serve not as monuments to a lost past, but as sources of energy, creativity, and imagination for the future of a city.
Deep Dish Conversations
Voices of Social Change in NashvilleJerome Moore
Vanderbilt University Press, 2023
This book is a curated collection of the most striking interviews from the first few seasons of the series, with a foreword by Dr. Sekou Franklin, an introduction by Moore, and contextual introductions to each interviewee. Figures like Judge Sheila Calloway, comedian Josh Black, anti-racism speaker Tim Wise, organizer Jorge Salles Diaz, and many more explore their wide-ranging perspectives on social change in a city in the midst of massive demographic and ideological shifts.
For anyone in any twenty-first-century city, Deep Dish Conversations offers a lot to think about—and a lot of ways to think about it.
Greetings from New Nashville
How a Sleepy Southern Town Became "It" CitySteve Haruch
Vanderbilt University Press, 2020
In that span of two decades, the boundaries of Nashville did not change. But something did. Or rather, many somethings changed, and kept changing, until many who lived in Nashville began to feel they no longer recognized their own city. And some began to feel it wasn't their own city at all anymore as they were pushed to its fringes by rising housing costs. Between 1998 and 2018, the population of Nashville grew by 150,000. On some level, Nashville has always packaged itself for consumption, but something clicked and suddenly everyone wanted a taste. But why Nashville? Why now? What made all this change possible?
This book is an attempt to understand those transformations, or, if not to understand them, exactly, then to at least grapple with the question: What happened?
I'll Take You There
Exploring Nashville's Social Justice SitesAmie Thurber
Vanderbilt University Press, 2021
I'll Take You There is written by and with the people who most intimately know Nashville, foregrounding the struggles and achievements of people's movements toward social justice. The colloquial use of "I'll take you there" has long been a response to the call of a stranger: for recommendations of safe passage through unfamiliar territory, a decent meal and place to lay one's head, or perhaps a watering hole or juke joint.
In this book, more than one hundred Nashvillians "take us there," guiding us to places we might not otherwise encounter. Their collective entries bear witness to the ways that power has been used by social, political, and economic elites to tell or omit certain stories, while celebrating the power of counternarratives as a tool to resist injustice. Indeed, each entry is simultaneously a story about place, power, and the historic and ongoing struggle toward a more just city for all. The result is akin to the experience of asking for directions in an unfamiliar place and receiving a warm offer from a local to lead you on, accompanied by a tale or two.
Mastodons to Mississippians
Adventures in Nashville's Deep PastAaron Deter-Wolf
Vanderbilt University Press, 2021
Was Nashville once home to a giant race of humans?
No, but in 1845, you could have paid a quarter to see the remains of one who allegedly lived here before The Flood. That summer, Middle Tennessee well diggers had unearthed the skeleton of an American mastodon. Before it went on display, it was modified and augmented with wooden “bones” to make it look more like a human being and passed off as an antediluvian giant. Then, like so many Nashvillians, after a little success here, it went on tour and disappeared from history.
But this fake history of a race of Pre-Nashville Giants isn’t the only bad history of what, and who, was here before Nashville. Sources written for schoolchildren and the public lead us to believe that the first Euro-Americans arrived in Nashville to find a pristine landscape inhabited only by the buffalo and boundless nature, entirely untouched by human hands. Instead, the roots of our city extend some 14,000 years before Illinois lieutenant-governor-turned-fur-trader Timothy Demonbreun set foot at Sulphur Dell.
During the period between about AD 1000 and 1425, a thriving Native American culture known to archaeologists as the Middle Cumberland Mississippian lived along the Cumberland River and its tributaries in today’s Davidson County. Earthen mounds built to hold the houses or burials of the upper class overlooked both banks of the Cumberland near what is now downtown Nashville. Surrounding densely packed village areas including family homes, cemeteries, and public spaces stretched for several miles through Shelby Bottoms, and the McFerrin Park, Bicentennial Mall, and Germantown neighborhoods. Other villages were scattered across the Nashville landscape, including in the modern neighborhoods of Richland, Sylvan Park, Lipscomb, Duncan Wood, Centennial Park, Belle Meade, White Bridge, and Cherokee Park.
This book is the first public-facing effort by legitimate archaeologists to articulate the history of what happened here before Nashville happened.
Nashville in the New Millennium
Immigrant Settlement, Urban Transformation, and Social BelongingJamie Winders
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
Nashville's New Americans
Tracing the Journeys of Our Immigrant NeighborsSheri Lea Sellmeyer
Vanderbilt University Press, 2026
Whether it’s building skyscrapers, running successful restaurants, researching diseases, performing music, cleaning hotel rooms, or holding public office, immigrants are changing Nashville from a mid‑sized city known for its country music industry to an increasingly diverse, multicultural destination. In Metro Nashville schools today, students speak more than 120 languages. The city is bigger, more congested, and more expensive than it’s ever been, drawing criticism from both longtime residents and newcomers. But growth has also brought top‑notch scientists and educators, a world‑class symphony, major league sports teams, investment from major corporations—and a wide range of immigrants whose talent and hard work have helped make all of that happen.
Through its profiles of thirty-nine immigrants from thirty-eight countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Australia, Nashville’s New Americans provides a case study from one of the fastest-growing cities in the country on the contributions immigrants are making to its culture and economy.
Nowville
The Untold History of Nashville's Contemporary Art SceneJoe Nolan
Vanderbilt University Press, 2024
This is the origin story of Nashville’s surging contemporary art scene told by the ones who were there before anyone else. Not a story about commercial spaces or official institutions—this is the story of moldy warehouse studios and improvised galleries, happy-kegger after-parties and front lawn art sales, exhibitions in apartment living rooms and secret art displays hidden in plain sight.
Nowville is an oral history of the Nashville art scene beginning in the 1990s. Author Joe Nolan tracks down the city’s art punks, art monks, radical art students, and visionary pioneers to share what made their moments in Nashville so special. He also offers insights into how this homespun movement powered by DIY innovating came to be a thriving creative community and a cornerstone of the city’s contemporary allure.
This book is the recipient of the 2025 Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize from Vanderbilt University Press for the best book in the area of art or medicine.
The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780-1930
Elites and DilemmasBobby 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.
The Come Apart
A NovelSusannah Felts
Northwestern University Press, 2026
An authentic rock band story from Chicago to Nashville and, just maybe, back again
On the cusp of turning thirty, Chicago indie musician Maggie Corbin has hustled for a decade, set on making her rock and roll dreams come true. Her band, Spinning Birds, fronted by Maggie and her romantic partner Matt Turkish, releases a debut record to critical acclaim, hits the road, and begins working on a follow-up. From the outside, her path looks like success—but as streaming deconstructs the industry and Maggie’s relationships shift and slip, the question remains: Can you live for art alone?
When a sudden move back to the South forces Maggie to reframe her dreams and reckon with familial rifts and her past—while still fighting to reimagine what her future could be—a natural disaster in Nashville and a surprise encounter with a character from her childhood shift her perspective on healing, community, and the ties that bind. Drifting in and out of songwriting sessions, cozy kitchens, and moments of bearing witness to the curious power of the natural world, The Come Apart celebrates the times when we must come fully undone in order to put ourselves back together.
The New Negro in the Old South
Briggs, Gabriel A
Rutgers University Press, 2015
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.
The Secrets of the Hopewell Box
Stolen Elections, Southern Politics, and a City's Coming of AgeJames D. Squires
Vanderbilt University Press, 1996
—Kirkus Reviews
"His richly textured narrative charts the Nashville machine's rupture with the state's top political boss, Edward Crump of Memphis, and traces the sweeping reforms that shattered rural white control of the state legislature. Squires dramatically reenacts the downfall of Nashville lawyer Tommy Osborn, convicted of jury tampering in 1964 after defending Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. He follows Nashville's transformation into a crucible of the civil rights movement in this stirring chronicle of the South's coming-of-age."
—Publishers Weekly
Voyage of the Adventure
Retracing the Donelson Party's Journey to the Founding of NashvilleJohn Guider
Vanderbilt University Press, 2021
This photo book contains more than 120 striking images from the course of the journey, allowing the reader to see how much has changed and how much has remained untouched in the two and a half centuries since Donelson first took to the water. Equally significant, the essays include long-ignored contemporary histories of both the Cherokee whom Donelson encountered and the slaves he brought with him, some of whom did not survive the journey.
Guider, a professional photographer, has created images of every point in the thousand-mile trip from a platform just a few feet above the waterline of three of Tennessee’s most notable rivers.
We Shall Overcome
Press Photographs of Nashville during the Civil Rights EraKathryn E. Delmez
Vanderbilt University Press, 2023
Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death—and at a time when race relations and social justice are again at the forefront of our country's consciousness—this book expands on a Frist Art Museum exhibition to present a selection of approximately one hundred photographs that document an important period in Nashville's struggle for racial equality. The images were taken between 1957, the year that desegregation in public schools began, and 1968, when the National Guard was called in to surround the state capitol in the wake of the civil rights leader's assassination in Memphis.
Of central significance are photographs of lunch counter sit-ins in early 1960, led by a group of students, including John Lewis (who contributed the book's foreword) and Diane Nash, from local historically black colleges and universities. The demonstrations were so successful that King stated just a few weeks later at Fisk University: "I did not come to Nashville to bring inspiration but to gain inspiration from the great movement that has taken place in this community." The role that Nashville played in the national civil rights movement as a hub for training students in nonviolent protest and as the first Southern city to integrate places of business is a story that warrants reexamination.
The book also provides an opportunity to consider the role of images and the media in shaping public opinion, a relevant subject in today's news-saturated climate. Photographs from the archives of both daily newspapers are included: the Tennessean, which was the more liberal publication, and the Nashville Banner, a conservative paper whose leadership seemed less interested in covering events related to racial issues. Some of the photographs in the exhibition had been selected to be published in the papers, but many were not, and their disclosure reveals insight into the editorial process. In several images, other photojournalists and news crews are visible, serving as a reminder of the almost constant presence of the camera during these historic times.
Essays by Linda Wynn of Fisk University and the Tennessee Historical Commission and Susan H. Edwards, executive director of the Frist Art Museum, offer historical context on Nashville during the civil rights era and on photojournalism, respectively. Congressman John Lewis's foreword recounts memories of his time in Nashville and reminds us that there is still work to be done to build King's Beloved Community.
We Should Soon Become Respectable
Nashville's Own Timothy DemonbreunElizabeth Elkins
Vanderbilt University Press, 2022
Lightly called a "fur trader," he came to the city to make his fortune and fame, much like songwriters today. Looking back, it would be easy to call Demonbreun, the son of French Canadian near-royalty and brother to two nuns, a spoiled child who did what he wanted, a classic-case misogynist and polygamist, a conceited adventurer. He was a man who conned the Spanish governor out of a war, carried on graceful correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, owned several slaves, may have served as a spy, and was a decorated veteran. He fought in the Revolutionary War, extraordinarily so it seems, given the number of land grants he received across Kentucky and Tennessee.
He's also known around Nashville as the guy who lived in a cave.
Author Elizabeth Elkins sorts through the legends and nails down the facts in order to present the true story of "Nashville's First Citizen."
Where No Flag Flies
Donald Davidson and the Southern ResistanceMark 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.