About Tennessee

Tennessee is three states in one, East, Middle, and West, each with its own geography, history, economy, and cultural identity, bound together by a state government in Nashville and a set of shared experiences that somehow produced both the blues and country music, both the atomic bomb and Dolly Parton, both the Scopes Trial and the most progressive sit-in movement of the civil rights era.

The Great Smoky Mountains in the east draw more visitors than any national park in America. Nashville in the middle has grown from Music City into the healthcare capital of the nation and one of the most rapidly expanding metropolitan areas in the country. Memphis in the west sits at the junction of the Mississippi River and American musical history, the city where Elvis recorded his first single, where Otis Redding made his records, and where Martin Luther King was killed, a city still working through what all of that means.

Tennessee earns its nickname. The Volunteer State sent more soldiers per capita than almost any state to the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War. It has been first to many things in American history , first to readmit a Confederate state after the Civil War, first to put the evolution debate on national trial, first to secretly build a nuclear weapon. It is a state that consistently finds itself at the center of American arguments, whether it wants to be there or not.