Tennessee tourist information...

The area now known as Tennessee was first settled by Paleo-Indians nearly 11,000 years ago. The names of the cultural groups that inhabited the area between first settlement and the time of European contact are unknown, but several distinct cultural phases have been named by archaeologists, including Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian whose chiefdoms were the cultural predecessors of the Muscogee people who inhabited the Tennessee River Valley prior to Cherokee migration into the river's headwaters.

When Spanish explorers first visited the area, led by Hernando de Soto in 1539–43, it was inhabited by tribes of Muscogee and Yuchi people. Possibly because of European diseases devastating the Native tribes, which would have left a population vacuum, and also from expanding European settlement in the north, the Cherokee moved south from the area now called Virginia. As European colonists spread into the area, the native populations were forcibly displaced to the south and west, including all Muscogee and Yuchi peoples, including the Chickasaw and Choctaw. From 1838 to 1839, nearly 17,000 Cherokees were forced to march from Eastern Tennessee to Indian Territory west of Arkansas. This came to be known as the Trail of Tears, as an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died along the way.1

Tennessee was admitted to the Union in 1796 as the 16th state; it was created by taking the north and south borders of North Carolina and extending them with only one small deviation to the Mississippi River, Tennessee's western boundary. The word Tennessee comes from the Cherokee Indian language. Some believe the word to be generic and is a transliteration of the Cherokee word "tanasi" meaning village. However, there is a historic marker in East Tennessee attributing the word "tanasi" to the capital city of the Cherokee nation.

The American Civil War to a large extent was fought in Tennessee. It was the last border state to secede from the Union when it joined the Confederate States of America on June 8, 1861. Many battles were fought in the state—most of them Union victories. Ulysses S. Grant and the U.S. Navy captured control of the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers in February 1862, and they held off the Confederate counterattack at Shiloh in April. Capture of Memphis and Nashville gave the Union control of the western and middle sections; this control was confirmed at the battle of Murfreesboro in early January 1863. But the Confederates held East Tennessee despite the strength of Unionist sentiment there, with the exception of extremely pro-Confederate Sullivan County.

The Confederates besieged Chattanooga in early fall 1863, but were driven off by Grant in November. Many of the Confederate defeats can be attributed to the poor strategic vision of General Braxton Bragg, who led the Army of Tennessee from Shiloh to Confederate defeat at Chattanooga. The last major battles came when the Confederates invaded in November 1864 and were checked at Franklin, then totally destroyed by George Thomas at Nashville, in December. Meanwhile Andrew Johnson, a civilian appointed by President Abraham Lincoln, was the military governor, and slavery was abolished.

After the war, Tennessee adopted a new constitution that abolished slavery effective February 22, 1865 and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 18, 1866. Tennessee was the first state readmitted to the Union on July 24, 1866. Because it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, Tennessee was the only state that seceded from the Union that did not have a military governor during Reconstruction.

The Nashville Republican Banner on January 4, 1868, published an editorial calling for a counter-revolutionary movement to unseat Republican rule and restore the racial subjugation of the region's blacks. "In this State," the paper argued, "reconstruction has perfected itself and done its worst. It has organized a government which is as complete a close corporation as may be found, it has placed the black man over the white as the agent and prime-move of domination; it has constructed a system of machinery by which all free guarantees, privileges and opportunities are removed from the people.

The impossibility of casting a free vote in Tennessee short of a revolutionary movement... is an undoubted fact." The Banner in conclusion urged readers to ignore the presidential election and instead put energies into building "a local movement here at home" that would end Republican rule. [cited in Harcourt 2005]

In 1897, the state celebrated its centennial of statehood (albeit one year late) with a great exposition.

The need to create work for the unemployed during the Great Depression, the desire for rural electrification, and the desire to control the annual spring floods on the Tennessee River drove the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933. It quickly became the nation's largest public utility.

During World War II, Oak Ridge was selected as a United States Department of Energy national laboratory, one of the principal sites for the Manhattan Project's production and isolation of weapons-grade fissile material.