Whenever we talk about black history, we have to admit that there are large parts of it that are off limits to us. Before the civil-rights era, black lives were rarely chronicled in newspapers and books. We have to rely […]

The annual Louie Bluie Festival is held each year at Cove Lake State Park, about 30 miles north of Knoxville off I-75, but it celebrates the legacy of a musician who kept things lively in downtown Knoxville in the 1920s […]

We’d been wondering when this shoe might fall. Last week we learned that someone associated with the Journal Media Group, the News Sentinel’s corporate owner, disconnected or allowed to lapse several years’ worth of the archives of Metro Pulse, removing […]

Without preservationist organization Knox Heritage, the city of Knoxville would lack many of its now-familiar landmarks. The nonprofit began in 1974 as a group of volunteers gathered to save the Bijou Theatre, at a time when it appeared the 1909 […]

The new documentary about Nina Simone is making the rounds. It may not ever reach local theaters (it’s a Netflix production, available for streaming), but several weeks ago the Pilot Light, the Old City nightclub that usually hosts interesting live […]

The Knox County Public Library Foundation is taking on its most ambitious project: to digitize all the copies of one Knoxville newspaper from 1922 to 1990. Why digitize a newspaper? Almost all modern history depends on newspaper research. Although any […]

In the wake of his sudden death Saturday before last, dozens of travel-writing professionals have been hailing Keith Bellows as a giant in the industry: “brilliant, a creative genius,” “always scanning the horizon for the next great thing,” “a pusher, […]

Knoxville was not always crazy about football. Although college football is most popular in the Southeast, the new sport, which evolved in the Northeast in the 25 years after the Civil War, caught on in other parts of the nation […]