Tennessee earned its name in 1846 when the War Department called for 3,000 volunteers and 30,000 showed up. The state had to turn most of them away. Memphis turned the blues into rock and Beale Street into a verb. Nashville built country music into a global industry. Oak Ridge enriched the uranium for Hiroshima behind a fence nobody was allowed to see. Three grand divisions, six border states, the Smokies in the east and the Mississippi in the west — and one volunteer ethic running the length of it.
Tennessee stretches nearly 500 miles from the Appalachian peaks on the Virginia and North Carolina borders to the Mississippi River floodplain at Memphis. Its three Grand Divisions — East, Middle, and West Tennessee — are enshrined in the state constitution and remain distinct in landscape, culture, and politics.
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The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Creek nations inhabited Tennessee’s river valleys and mountain coves for thousands of years. The Overhill Cherokee towns along the Little Tennessee River were centers of Cherokee political and spiritual life. Long hunters like Daniel Boone and James Robertson pushed through the Cumberland Gap in the 1760s and 1770s, and the Watauga Association — established in 1772 by Scots-Irish settlers in what is now northeast Tennessee — created the first written constitution by American-born citizens west of the Appalachians.
Tennessee became the sixteenth state on June 1, 1796, carved from the southwestern territory that North Carolina had ceded to the federal government. Andrew Jackson emerged from the Tennessee frontier as a militia general, land speculator, and eventually the seventh president — the first from west of the Appalachians. His victories at Horseshoe Bend (1814) and New Orleans (1815) made him a national hero, and his Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced the Cherokee from their Tennessee and Georgia homeland onto the Trail of Tears.
Tennessee was the last state to secede from the Union in June 1861 and was bitterly divided — East Tennessee was heavily Unionist, with many of its counties sending men to the Union Army despite Confederate occupation. The state became one of the war’s bloodiest battlegrounds: Shiloh (1862), Stones River (1863), Chickamauga (1863), Chattanooga (1863), and Franklin (1864) all scarred Tennessee soil. Nashville fell to Union forces in February 1862 and served as a major Union supply base for the rest of the war.
The twentieth century transformed Tennessee through music and power. The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933, dammed the Tennessee River system, bringing electricity to rural hollows that had never had it, and producing the cheap power that attracted the secret Manhattan Project facilities at Oak Ridge in 1942. Memphis produced the blues, then gave it to a young truck driver from Tupelo named Elvis Presley who walked into Sun Studio in 1953 and changed everything. Nashville built the country music industry from the Grand Ole Opry outward, turning a Saturday-night radio barn dance into a billion-dollar creative economy.
Today Tennessee is one of the fastest-growing states in America. Nashville draws transplants from every major city; its skyline has transformed beyond recognition in a decade. Memphis wrestles with poverty and violence while sustaining one of the great urban music cultures on earth. The Smoky Mountains receive more visitors than Yellowstone and Grand Canyon combined. Tennessee has no state income tax, a fact its boosters advertise relentlessly and its critics note comes at a cost. The three grand divisions still vote differently, worship differently, and argue with each other constantly — as they always have.
Scots-Irish settlers in northeast Tennessee form the Watauga Association — the first written constitution drafted by American-born citizens, a prototype for self-governance west of the Appalachians.
Tennessee enters the Union on June 1 as the sixteenth state. John Sevier becomes the first governor. The state immediately begins producing presidents: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson all come from here.
Andrew Jackson leads Tennessee volunteers to a lopsided victory over British regulars at Chalmette. The battle makes him a national hero and eventually the seventh president.
The U.S. Army rounds up the Cherokee Nation from their Tennessee and Georgia homeland. Roughly 4,000 of 16,000 Cherokee die during the forced march to Oklahoma. The removal is ordered by Tennessee’s own Andrew Jackson.
Two days of fighting on the Tennessee River in April 1862 produce 23,000 casualties — more than all previous American wars combined. The nation realizes the war will not be short.
Roosevelt signs the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, launching the most ambitious regional development program in American history: 29 dams, rural electrification, flood control, and the cheap power that will attract a secret weapons program a decade later.
The Manhattan Project builds a secret city of 75,000 workers in the Tennessee hills to enrich uranium for the atomic bomb. Oak Ridge workers do not know what they are making until Hiroshima.
Elvis Presley walks into Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio in Memphis and records “That’s All Right.” Rock and roll begins. Elvis is nineteen years old.
Martin Luther King Jr. is shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4. He had come to support striking sanitation workers. The motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum.
A 1,000-year flood inundates Nashville in May, killing 26 people and causing $2 billion in damage. The city rebuilds in two years — and then rebuilds itself economically into one of America’s fastest-growing metros.
Real Tennessee people who have placed their names — and their stories — into the hex grid. Each square mile, a chapter.
My daughter Emma was born on October 14, 2014, at thirty-one weeks gestation, weighing two pounds and eleven ounces. She was diagnosed in th...
View StoryMy father was nineteen years old when he landed in Korea in November of 1950. He was a corporal in the Second Infantry Division. He was at t...
View StoryThis is for the small towns of Tennessee. The ones nobody writes songs about. The ones that raised us anyway.
View Story
For my wife Elena, who passed in May after fifty-one years of marriage. We met in Nashville in 1973, at a wedding neither of us wanted to at...
View StoryFor my son Jacob, who deployed to Afghanistan three times between 2009 and 2014 and came home different each time. He does not talk about wh...
View StoryMy husband Michael was an EMT with the Nashville Fire Department for nineteen years. We met in 1992 at a barbecue at my brother's house — he...
View Story
From the Smoky Mountain peaks where the AT crosses the line to the Mississippi bluffs where Beale Street meets the river, from the Grand Ole Opry stage to the Oak Ridge enrichment halls — ninety-five counties of the state that gave the world its sound track and answered every call. Volunteer.
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