Tennessee

• 1. Introduction

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  Tennessee sits at the crossroads of three distinct American worlds. From the fog-wrapped peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the east, across the cave-riddled limestone plains of the center, to the flat cotton fields of the west, this single state contains multitudes. Its highest point, Kuwohi, rises 6,643 feet above sea level. Its lowest, just 178 feet, touches the Mississippi River at the state's western edge. The distance between them is not just geographic. It is cultural, historical, and deeply contested.

  The state's name traces back to a Cherokee town called Tanasi, located in present-day Monroe County on the river now known as the Little Tennessee. A Spanish explorer encountered a village bearing a similar name as far back as 1567. The modern spelling was fixed by Governor James Glen of South Carolina in the 1750s. That layered origin, Indigenous, Spanish, British, and finally American, sets the tone for everything that follows.

  Tennessee entered the Union on the 1st of June 1796, as the 16th state, the first carved out of federal territory rather than an existing colony. It was the last state to secede before the Civil War and the first former Confederate state readmitted to the Union afterward. It ratified the amendment granting women the right to vote, becoming the 36th and deciding state to do so. It housed the uranium enrichment facilities that produced the world's first atomic bombs. And it gave the world blues, country, rock and roll, soul, and gospel. How one state accumulated all of that is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Name from the Cherokee

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  Tanasi appears on British maps as early as 1725, though the town itself is far older. Recent research suggests the Cherokees may have adapted the name from the Yuchi language, from a phrase meaning something close to "where the waters meet". The town sat on the river that would later bear Tennessee's anglicized name before being renamed the Little Tennessee.

  Spanish explorer Juan Pardo encountered a village called "Tanasqui" in 1567 while traveling inland from what is now South Carolina, though whether this was the same settlement as Tanasi remains uncertain. The name drifted through colonial correspondence for nearly two centuries before Governor James Glen of South Carolina standardized the spelling in official letters during the 1750s. North Carolina formalized it in 1788 by naming a county "Tennessee County", and in 1796, a constitutional convention organizing the new state from the Southwest Territory adopted it permanently.

  That a state's official name should derive from a Cherokee town speaks to how deeply the Cherokee shaped the land before being removed from it. The Cherokees had lived in eastern Tennessee since at least the late 17th century, migrating from what is now Virginia partly to escape European diseases spreading from the north. They forced competing groups, including the Creek, Yuchi, and Shawnee, out of the region in the early 18th century. European settlers called them the Overhill Cherokee because they lived west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their settlements grew along the rivers of East Tennessee, and their presence defined the geography and politics of the region for more than a century.

• 3. Before Europe Arrived

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  Paleo-Indians reached the Tennessee region about 12,000 years ago, at the close of the Last Glacial Period. The lower Tennessee Valley, archaeologists have found, was heavily populated by Ice Age hunter-gatherers. Middle Tennessee likely teemed with large game animals, including mastodons.

  Archaeologists have identified several distinct cultural periods. The Archaic period, spanning roughly 8000 to 1000 BC, saw the first domestication of dogs in the region. The Woodland period, from 1000 BC to 1000 AD, brought the cultivation of squash, corn, gourds, and sunflowers, and later generations of these peoples constructed the earliest mounds. The Mississippian period, from 1000 to 1600 AD, produced organized chiefdoms and numerous ceremonial structures throughout the state.

  Spanish conquistadors who passed through in the 16th century encountered Mississippian peoples, including the Muscogee Creek, Yuchi, and Shawnee. By the early 18th century, most of Tennessee's Native peoples had vanished, almost certainly wiped out by diseases introduced by Spanish contact. The Chickasaw, confined to West Tennessee, and the Cherokee, who had migrated into the east, were among the survivors. Both the Cherokee and Shawnee claimed Middle Tennessee as hunting ground, though few actually lived there. That contested middle ground would later become some of the most fought-over territory in American history.

• 4. Frontier Self-Governance

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  Fort Loudoun, built by settlers from the Colony of South Carolina on the Little Tennessee River in 1756, was the first British settlement in what is now Tennessee. It was also the westernmost British outpost in North America at the time. Four years after its construction, a siege by the Cherokee ended in its surrender.

  The settlers who pushed back into the region in the late 1760s were predominantly English, with nearly 20% of Scotch-Irish descent. Cut off from stable colonial governance west of the Appalachians, they formed the Watauga Association in 1772, a semi-autonomous representative government that is generally regarded as the first constitutional government west of the Appalachian Mountains. Three years later, they reorganized as the Washington District to support the American Revolutionary War.

  Daniel Boone, employed by land speculator Richard Henderson, blazed a trail in 1775 from Fort Chiswell in Virginia through the Cumberland Gap. That path became part of the Wilderness Road, a major artery into Tennessee and Kentucky. That same year, Dragging Canoe, a Cherokee leader loyal to the British, attacked Fort Watauga at Sycamore Shoals. His cousin Nancy Ward warned the settlers, sparing many lives.

  By 1779, James Robertson and John Donelson led two groups of settlers to the French Lick near the Cumberland River. They built Fort Nashborough, named for Continental Army brigadier general Francis Nash. The Cumberland Compact they signed the following year established a representative government for the settlement. That colony grew into Nashville. When three counties broke from North Carolina in 1784 and declared themselves the State of Franklin, they failed to gain admission to the Union, but the episode illustrated how fiercely independent these frontier communities had become.

• 5. The Volunteer State

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  Tennessee officially became the 16th state on the 1st of June 1796, the first created from federal territory. John Sevier, who had led the Overmountain Men at the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina in 1780, was announced as the state's first governor the day after the legislature first convened.

  The nickname "The Volunteer State" emerged during the War of 1812, when the General Assembly called for 3,500 soldiers and Tennesseans answered. Those troops, under Andrew Jackson's command, played a decisive role in the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. The nickname was solidified during the Mexican-American War, when President James K. Polk, himself a Tennessean, called for 2,800 soldiers, and more than 30,000 volunteered.

  Several Tennesseans joined the Texas Revolution of 1835-36, including Governor Sam Houston and frontiersman and Congressman Davy Crockett, who was killed at the Battle of the Alamo. The pattern held across generations: when the nation went to war, Tennessee sent men in numbers far exceeding any formal obligation.

  The darker side of antebellum Tennessee took shape as settlers pushed west of the Cumberland Plateau. A slavery-based cotton economy took hold in the flat, fertile terrain of West Tennessee after the Jackson Purchase of 1818, when Andrew Jackson and Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby negotiated the purchase of Chickasaw land between the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers. In 1838 and 1839, U.S. troops forcibly removed thousands of Cherokees from southeastern Tennessee and marched them to present-day Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 died along the way. That event is known as the Trail of Tears.

• 6. Divided by War

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  In 1860, enslaved people made up about 25% of Tennessee's population, the lowest share among the states that would join the Confederacy. That statistic hints at the state's deep internal divisions. A referendum on secession in February 1861 failed by a 54-46% margin. After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops, a second vote in June reversed that result, 69-31%, as Middle Tennesseans shifted dramatically.

  Tennessee was the last state to secede and the only former Confederate state to abolish slavery on its own, before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. Andrew Johnson declared all slaves in Tennessee free on the 24th of October 1864. The legislature approved an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting slavery on the 22nd of February 1865. Tennessee ratified the Thirteenth Amendment on the 7th of April 1865, and the Fourteenth Amendment on the 18th of July 1866.

  Tennessee saw more military engagements than any state except Virginia. Union forces captured the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers in February 1862 at Forts Henry and Donelson. The Battle of Shiloh in April of that year was, at the time, the bloodiest engagement of the entire war. The battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge in November 1863 opened the path for Sherman's Atlanta campaign. The last major Tennessee battles came in the fall of 1864, when Confederate forces under John Bell Hood were stopped at Franklin in November and dispersed at Nashville in December.

  On the 27th of April 1865, the steamboat Sultana, carrying freed Union prisoners, exploded in the Mississippi River north of Memphis, killing 1,168 people. It remains the worst maritime disaster in American history. On the 24th of July 1866, Tennessee became the first former Confederate state to have its elected members readmitted to Congress.

• 7. The Sound of Tennessee

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  Beale Street in Memphis drew musicians including W. C. Handy as early as 1909, and is widely regarded as the epicenter of the blues. The 1927 Victor recording sessions in Bristol are generally taken as the starting point of the country music genre. Those two moments, separated by less than two decades, bracket a creative explosion that reshaped American popular culture.

  Sun Records in Memphis, where Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich all began recording, is where rock and roll crystallized in the 1950s. Stax Records, also in Memphis, became one of the most important labels for soul music in the late 1950s and 1960s, producing a subgenre known as Memphis soul. The Grand Ole Opry, which rose to prominence in the 1930s, remains the nation's longest-running radio show and helped make Nashville the center of country music recording.

  Nashville became known as "Music City", a designation anchored by Music Row, the Ryman Auditorium, and institutions like the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum and the National Museum of African American Music. Memphis preserves its heritage through Sun Studio, the Blues Hall of Fame, and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music.

  The annual music calendar reflects the same breadth. The Beale Street Music Festival, the CMA Music Festival in Nashville, Bonnaroo in Manchester, and Riverbend in Chattanooga collectively draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. That a single state produced the seedbeds of so many distinct American musical forms, often within a few miles of each other, is one of the more remarkable facts in American cultural history.

• 8. Oak Ridge and the Modern State

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  The planned community of Oak Ridge did not exist before World War II. The U.S. government chose East Tennessee for uranium enrichment because of the abundant TVA electric power, the area's low population density, and its inland geography, which allowed the facilities to be naturally separated and offered low vulnerability to attack. The Clinton Engineer Works enriched uranium at three major facilities. The first atomic bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in a test code-named Trinity. The second, nicknamed "Little Boy", was dropped on Japan.

  After the war, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory became a center for scientific and technological research in materials science, nuclear physics, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology, and national security. It is the largest national laboratory in the Department of Energy system by size. The region between Oak Ridge and Knoxville became known as the Tennessee Technology Corridor in the 1990s, home to more than 500 high-tech firms.

  The Tennessee Valley Authority, created in 1933 as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to provide electricity, flood control, and economic modernization, grew into the country's largest electric utility. Today, the TVA owns over 90% of Tennessee's generating capacity. Nuclear power now produces about 43.4% of the state's electricity, and Tennessee is home to the first nuclear reactor in the U.S. to begin commercial operation in the 21st century, located at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant in Rhea County.

  The automotive industry stands as Tennessee's largest manufacturing sector. Nissan's assembly plant in Smyrna is the largest automotive assembly plant in North America. The state's gross state product reached $589.8 billion in 2025. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most visited national park in the country, draws more than 14 million visitors annually, making tourism another pillar of an economy that would have been unrecognizable to the cotton planters of antebellum West Tennessee.