I don’t know how many of our readers are aware of it, but the Knoxville Mercury is unprecedented in the history of American journalism. If this works, and with your help it can, it may be a national model for the […]

I was recently startled by a story I’d read before. It appeared in The New York Times in February 1999, 17 years ago this month. It was called “Notorious and Proud of It.” The byline belonged to Nancy Bearden Henderson, a […]

You can’t be too careful. In Knoxville of 1908, you needed to defend yourself and your property. That was the thinking of Monroe M. Stallings, who ran a double-front general store on North Central in Oakwood, the relatively new residential […]

Knoxville has celebrated Feb. 14 for generations, but not always with nice things. Its origin with the beheading of a Christian martyr is mysterious, and may have something to do with an odd Roman festival called Lupercalia, but Valentine’s Day […]

Feb. 6, 1796 was once considered Tennessee’s birthdate. It was the final day of the Constitutional Convention, a month-long meeting in downtown Knoxville. At that convention, 55 delegates from across the Southwestern Territory gathered here to draw up the new […]

We have what I think should be a big anniversary coming up this weekend. The Great Seal of the State of Tennessee has always included 1796, the year of the state’s birth. Until the 1840s, it had a precise date […]