Customer Reviews

Tennessee (America the Beautiful, Second)

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With the volume on "Tennessee" for the America the Beautiful, Second Series, I did something I had not done with any of the others I have read to date, which was to immediately go to the Index in the back to see what Deborah Kent has to say about the Scopes "Monkey" Trial of 1925. I did my dissertation on the trial, so I am always interested to see how it is playing out in any and all books that young students read that touch on it. Not surprisingly, there is a sidebar taking up a whole page devoted to "The Monkey Trial" (48) with a picture of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan sitting together at the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton. Kent provides a concise description of the legal issue of the trial involving the Butler Act and ignores the rhetoric of ridicule that came to dominate the publicity regarding the trial. Given the amount of space being devoted to the trial, Kent provides one of the more objective encapsulations of the trial I have seen in a while, which certainly bodes well for the rest of the book.

Chapter One, "The Big Red Curtain," confronts readers with the image of Tennessee most Americans have gotten from "The Grand Ole Opry," which has presented Tennessee as a state full of farmers obsessed with hogs, mules, and pickup trucks. Of course, Kent is going to show there is much more to the state. The next three chapters detail Tennessee's history, beginning with Chapter Two, "The Land of Abundance," which begins with the prehistoric Mound Builders and then the People of the Forest (the Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw) that the first European settlers crossing the Appalachian Mountains would have encountered. Chapter Three, "Under the Shadows," continues the story through the Revolutionary War and statehood up to the Civil War. That leaves everything from Reconstruction to the end of the 20th century for Chapter Four, "In Search of Unity," which ends with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis in 1968.

The geography of Tennessee is the subject of Chapter Five, "Three States in One," which tells how the unique arrangement of rivers, mountains, and lowlands breaks the state into three distinct sections known as east, middle and west Tennessee. Chapter Six, "Turns in the Road," follows that same division to look at what visitors can explore in each region of the state, such as the Sunsphere, Andrew Jackson's Hermitage, and Graceland. Chapter Seven, "From a Hilltop in Nashville," covers the politics of the state, which covers all of the state's symbols and explains the flag and seal (by now the what the three stars on the state flag mean should be obvious).

The agriculture and commerce of the states motto are detailed in Chapter Eight, "The Plow and the Riverboat," which is where we get this book's recipe for Fried Green Tomatoes. The people of Tennessee are covered in Chapter Nine, "At Home in the Volunteer State," although the individual citizens of the state you whose names you would recognize come in Chapter Ten, "The Spirit of Tennessee." This is where Kent talks about Davy Crockett, Robert Penn Warren, W.C. Handy, B.B. King, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, and Elvis Presley (born in Tupelo, Mississippi but moved to Memphis when he was young).

The people and places of Tennessee are also covered in sidebars throughout the book, which is where we learn about the Cherokee syllabary created by Sequoyah, Old Hickory, Shiloh National Military Park, Andrew Johnson (The President Who Never Went to School), Tennessee Walkers, Al Gore, and Bessie Smith. There are full color photographs throughout the book along with original maps on topography and population density. A detailed Timeline shows U.S. and Tennessee state history side-by-side, followed by several pages of Fast Facts in the back of the book. Whether you are a young student living in Tennessee, planning a visit, or studying the state for class, this book provides a solid introduction to the state.