Tennessee
State in East central USA; nicknamed Volunteer State
Area:
109,200 sq km/42,151 sq mi
Capital:
Nashville
Towns and Cities:
Memphis, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Clarksville
Physical:
Great Smoky Mountains national park (a World Heritage Site) ; Cumberland
River; Newfoundland Gap, with Clingmans Dome (2,024 m/6,643 ft), the
highest point in the state; Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga
Features:
Nashville, the capital of country music, with Opryland USA ( Grand
Ole Opry, the oldest radio show in the USA, started 1925, is broadcast
from here), the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, RCA Studio B,
the Parthenon in Centennial Park (a copy of the Parthenon in Athens),
Belle Meade Mansion (a Greek Revival house and thoroughbred breeding
estate, former site of the Iroquois, the oldest amateur steeplechase
in the USA), Fort Nashborough (a re-creation of the 1779 log fort),
Historic Second Avenue Business District, Downtown Presbyterian Church
(c. 1851, Egyptian Revival), the Hermitage (Andrew Jackson's mansion)
and Andrew Jackson Center, and the Tennessee Botanical Garden at Cheekwood;
Memphis, home of the blues, with the W C Handy Memphis home and museum,
Sun Studio (the birthplace of rock and roll), Magevney House (1830s,
the oldest building in the city), and Pyramid Arena (1991); the National
Civil Rights Museum, site of the assassination of Martin Luther King
Jr 1968; Shiloh national military park; Civil War battlefields at Chattanooga
; Knoxville, with the Governor William Blount Mansion and the Armstrong-Lockett
House (an 1834 farm mansion); Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House (1867)
at Lynchburg; the headquarters of the Tennessee Valley Authority, established
1933, the largest electricity-generating station in the USA, at Knoxville;
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, founded 1943 as part of the Manhattan
Project to develop an atomic bomb; Fisk University, Vanderbilt University,
and Belmont College, in Nashville; Graceland, the estate of Elvis Presley;
dogwood trees, especially in Knoxville
Industries:
Cereals, cotton, tobacco, soya beans, livestock, timber, coal, zinc,
copper, chemicals
Population:
(1995) 5,256,100
Famous People:
Davy Crockett, David Farragut, Aretha Franklin, W C Handy, Cordell
Hull, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Dolly Parton, John Crowe Ransom,
Bessie Smith
History:
Settled by Europeans 1757; became a state 1796. Tennessee was deeply
divided in the Civil War; the battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro,
Chattanooga, and Nashville were fought here. Tennessee was explored
by Hernando de Soto for Spain 1521, Robert de la Salle for France
in the 1670s, and Virginia colonists James Needham and Gabriel
Arthur for England in the 1680s. After England obtained the region
as settlement of the French and Indian War 1763, it was occupied
by settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas. After the Civil War,
with Tennessean Andrew Johnson in the White House, it was the
only former Confederate state not to have a military government
imposed during Reconstruction. Coal and iron deposits attracted
Northern capital, and by the early 1880s, flour, wool, and paper
mills were established in all urban areas. Both prohibitionism
and religious fundamentalism were strong; in 1925 the Scopes monkey
trial was held in Dayton, and the law against the teaching of
the theory of evolution in public schools was not repealed until
1967. The 1930s brought large-scale development in the form of
the federal Tennessee Valley Authority and prepared the state
for the industrialization that followed World War II.
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