Portal:Tennessee/Selected article
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The Scopes Trial (Scopes v. State, 152 Tenn. 424, 278 S.W. 57 (Tenn. 1925), often called the "Scopes Monkey Trial") was a legal case that tested a law that forbade the teaching of evolution in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee. The case was a watershed in the creation-evolution controversy.
John Scopes, a high school teacher, was charged on May 5, 1925, with teaching evolution from a chapter in a textbook which showed ideas developed from those set out in Charles Darwin's book The Origin of Species. This was a violation of the Butler Act, passed by the Tennessee General Assembly and signed into law earlier that year. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had offered to defend anyone accused of teaching the theory of evolution in defiance of the Butler Act, and local businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee recruited Scopes to test the law with the expectation that the trial would give Dayton much publicity. The trial pitted two of the preeminent legal minds of the time against one another. William Jennings Bryan headed up the prosecution, while Clarence Darrow spoke for the defense.
The trial, held in the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, then a town of 1,800, brought world-wide news media attention to small-town Tennessee.
The trial jury found Scopes guilty. In 1927 his conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court, but the court found the Butler Act to be constitutional. The statute remained on the books until 1967, when it was repealed by the state legislature.
The famous trial formed the basis for fictionalized accounts in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, a 1960 Hollywood motion picture, and 1965, 1988 and 1999 television films of the same name. (Read more...)
FedEx Corporation is a leading logistics services company based in Memphis, Tennessee. The company was founded as Federal Express (FedEx is an abbreviation of the original name) in 1971 by Fred Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas. The company moved to Memphis in 1973 because Little Rock airport officials would not agree to provide facilities for the company's airplanes.
Federal Express began operations on April 17, 1973, as the first cargo airline that used only jet aircraft for its services. It expanded greatly after the deregulation of the cargo airlines sector.
FedEx operates much of its U.S. overnight freight through its Memphis hub. (Read more...)
The Ryman Auditorium in Nashville is a 2,362-seat live performance venue best known as the one-time home of the Grand Ole Opry.
The auditorium was first opened as the Union Gospel Tabernacle in 1892. It was used for Grand Ole Opry broadcasts from 1943 until 1974, when the Opry built a larger venue just outside Nashville at the Opryland USA theme park. The Ryman then sat mostly vacant until 1992, when Emmylou Harris and her band the Nash Ramblers performed a series of concerts there (the results of which appeared on her album At the Ryman). The Harris concerts renewed interest in the restoring the Ryman; it was reopened as an intimate performance venue and museum in 1994. In 2001, the Ryman Auditorium was designated a National Historic Landmark and included in the National Register of Historic Places.
Among the greats of country music who have performed at the Ryman over the years are Roy Acuff, Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, Patsy Cline, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Emmylou Harris, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Glen Campbell, Reba McEntire, Dolly Parton, Marty Robbins, Ernest Tubb, Dottie West, Hank Williams, and Tammy Wynette. (Read more...)Rugby is a settlement in Morgan County, Tennessee, that was founded in 1880 by British author Thomas Hughes, who is best known for writing the novel Tom Brown's School Days. Rugby, Tennessee, is named for Rugby, Warwickshire, England, where Hughes had attended Rugby School, the school that furnished the setting for the book.
Rugby was set up as an experiment in utopian living. It was intended in part as a community for the younger sons of the English gentry, who, because of the accepted system of primogeniture, would inherit little or no property. The settlement flourished for only a short while.
About half the original buildings, many in Ruskinian gothic revival style, survive and have been restored. Rugby currently has a population of around 85. The area's natural beauty, historic architecture, and seasonal festivals attract a brisk tourist trade. (Read more...)
The Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, was a major battle in the Western Theater of the American Civil War, fought on April 6 and April 7, 1862, in southwestern Tennessee. Confederate forces under Generals Albert Sidney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard launched a surprise attack against the Union Army of Major General Ulysses S. Grant and came very close to defeating his army.
On the first day of battle, the Confederates struck with the intention of driving the Union defenders away from the Tennessee River and into the swamps to the west, hoping to defeat Grant's Army of the Tennessee before it could link up with Major General Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio. The Confederate battle lines became confused during the fierce fighting, and Grant's men instead fell back in the direction of Pittsburg Landing to the northeast. A position on a slightly sunken road, nicknamed the "Hornet's Nest", defended by the men of Brigadier Generals Benjamin M. Prentiss's and W.H.L. Wallace's divisions, provided critical time for the rest of the Union line to stabilize under the protection of numerous artillery batteries. General Johnston was killed during the first day's fighting, and Beauregard, his second in command, decided against assaulting the final Union position that night.
Reinforcements from General Buell arrived in the evening and turned the tide the next morning, when Buell and Grant launched a counterattack along the entire line. The Confederates were forced to retreat, ending their hopes that they could block the Union invasion of northern Mississippi.
The two-day battle was the bloodiest in U.S. history up to that time. Union casualties were 13,047 (1,754 killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 missing). Confederate casualties were 10,699 (1,728 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing or captured). Both sides were shocked at the carnage.
The battlefield is now part of the Shiloh National Military Park. (Read more...)
Fisk University is a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, which opened its doors to its first classes on January 9, 1866.
Fisk is the home of the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. The Jubilee Singers started out in the 1870s as a group of traveling students who set out from Nashville to raise money for the school through their singing. After a tour of Europe in 1873 they sent enough money back to Fisk to build Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building in the country built for the education of newly-freed slaves.
Notable Fisk alumni include Marion Barry, former mayor of Washington D.C.; Cora Brown, the first African-American woman to be elected to a state senate; W.E.B. DuBois, a sociologist and scholar, who was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University; poet Nikki Giovanni; U.S. Congressman Alcee Hastings and John Lewis; concert singer Roland Hayes; and Alma Powell, wife of General Colin Powell. (Read more...)Portal:Tennessee/Selected article/7
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