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Our first big street fairs set a high bar for Fun, but also presented an early flowering of African American culture Imagine October in Knoxville, and subtract Volmania, drives in the Smokies, and Halloween decorations, and what would you have? […]

And the story of another Knoxville Hootenanny, the strangest concert of 1964 This month, our friends at the East Tennessee Historical Society are hosting a first-ever History Hootenanny. The word has a down-homey feel, which makes it a little surprising […]

The Scourge of the Snap-Shot People You may know that we have an ongoing project called “Knoxville Shoebox,” which is a slowly growing collection of personal photographs of historical value. Despite some major important collections of historic photographs, it’s surprising […]

Some thoughts about the new book about Frances Hodgson Burnett: Are we keeping our garden too secret? It’s gardening season, of course, and in local libraries and bookstores there’s a popular gift book called Unearthing the Secret Garden: The Plants and […]

So what’s Knoxville’s oldest restaurant Now? Some years ago, soon after the final closing of the venerable Regas Restaurant, I wrote a column in Metro Pulse pondering the question of what might be its successor as Knoxville’s Oldest. With something […]

Part of the lore of the 1982 World’s Fair, then and now, was that little ol’ Knoxville had the gumption, or arrogance, or naivete, to put on a world’s fair. The Wall Street Journal’s “scruffy little city” moniker, casting doubts on […]

A VALENTINE’S DAY STORY FOR BLACK HISTORY MONTH There are some names you see in Knoxville that you don’t see as much in other cities. The name Cansler is one. In Mechanicsville, there’s a Cansler Street, and on University Avenue, […]

The Evolution of Our Oddest Holiday   I had a much more serious subject in mind for this month’s column, but couldn’t find the data I needed in time to complete it. To make a serious point, you need to […]

Some people and things you might have seen one century ago, at Christmastime   It had been a dramatic year, one that had seen perhaps the only racially prompted lynch-mob riot in American history in which the only people injured […]