Everybody’s going to Havana these days. Obama, the Rolling Stones, half of my chums in Knoxville. I’ve always wanted to see Havana, myself. Cuba doesn’t intersect with Knoxville history very much. The word “Cuba” is on the Spanish-American War statue […]

This column would be more popular if I just gave in and renamed it Concerts We Have Known. After I wrote about the Civic Coliseum dilemma several weeks ago, I heard from a whole lot of people about a whole […]

Six weeks ago I attended the opening of the Knoxville Museum of Art’s Knoxville Seven show. Still hanging, it’s a show devoted to seven brash young artists who, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, challenged mainstream habits in […]

St. Patrick’s Day is an old holiday in Knoxville. Irish immigrants and their families have played a major role in Knoxville history. Several of the city’s early founders were Irish immigrants. At least two delegates to the Constitutional Convention that […]

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 […]