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The Knoxville Civic Auditorium and Coliseum dilemma illustrates a challenge to preservation practice and theory. The value of historic preservation is easier to prove with smaller buildings. In any building of less than 50,000 square feet, a building with so […]

Dr. King inspired his supporters here in 1960, but Knoxville’s civil rights effort began many years earlier. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Knoxville on Memorial Day, 1960, as the commencement speaker at Knoxville College. At the time, he was […]

Last month I attended a holiday event in Holly’s 135 upstairs. As I was offering a short presentation to a dinner crowd, I was asked about a large mural on the wall behind me. Partly obscured, it appears to say, […]

The Board of Aldermen, forerunner of Knoxville City Council, began meeting 200 years ago. Although Knoxville was considered a city as early as 1791, when it was the capital of the United States government’s Southwest Territory, and home of a […]

Knoxville’s first electric lights were turned on 130 years ago this week. Later, a former Knoxvillian used electric lights to change the way America celebrated New Year’s Eve. For its first 60 years or so, Knoxville depended mainly on candlelight and […]

This darkest season is darker with an unimagined loss. Twenty-odd years ago, Andie Ray was a familiar face at the checkout desk at Lawson McGhee Library. Even if you never saw her after that, you’d remember her. Her distinctive features […]

Contrary to some assumptions, Knoxville has a winter. Cold weather has played a big part in Knoxville’s history. Some Knoxville industry was oriented toward contending with winter. Some major Knoxville-based businesses, notably C.M. McClung, sold cast-iron heating stoves. Knoxville Woolen […]

Dread was in the air that December, threats of terrorism and gruesome stories of mass killings in Europe. Even the pope was saying the level of killing was “unprecedented.” An editorial predicted the closing year would be remembered as “a […]