In 1794, two years before Tennessee became a state, the legislature of the Southwest Territory chartered Blount College in Knoxville as one of the first three colleges established west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1807, the school changed its name to East Tennessee College. The school relocated to a 40-acre tract, known today as the Hill, in 1828 and was renamed East Tennessee University in 1840. The Civil War literally shut down the university. Students and faculty were recruited to serve on battlefields, and troops used campus facilities as hospitals and barracks. In 1869, East Tennessee University became the states land-grant institution under the auspices of the 1862 Morrill Act. In 1879, the state legislature changed the name of the institution to the University of Tennessee. By the early 20th century, the university admitted women, hosted teacher institutes, and constructed new buildings. Since that time, the University of Tennessee has established campuses and programs across the state. Today, in addition to a rich sports tradition, the University of Tennessee provides Tennesseans with unparalleled opportunities.

Mount Pleasant--Samuel P. Brown must have thought the name perfect when he chose it for his country estate on a wooded hill overlooking Washington City. The name also suited the New Englanders who settled in the village that Brown founded near Fourteenth Street and Park Road just after the Civil War. Around 1900, the once-isolated village began its transformation into a fashionable suburb after the city extended Sixteenth Street through Mount Pleasant's heart, and a new streetcar line linked the area to downtown. Developers constructed elegant apartment buildings and spacious brick row houses on block after block, and successful businessmen built stately residences along Park Road. Change arrived again with the Great Depression and then World War II, as the suburb evolved into an urban, exclusively white, working-class enclave that eventually became mostly African American. In addition, a Latino presence was evident as early as the 1960s. By the 1980s, the neighborhood was known as the heart of D.C.'s Latino and counterculture communities. Today these communities are dispersing, however, in response to a booming real estate market in Washington, D.C.

The Elizabeth River courses through the heart of Virginia. The Jamestown colonists recognized the river's strategic importance and explored its watershed almost immediately after the 1607 founding. The Elizabeth River traces four centuries of this historic stream's path through the geography and culture of Virginia.

In 2005, hurricane Katrina and its aftermath starkly revealed the continued racial polarization of America. Disproportionately impacted by the ravages of the storm, displaced black victims were often characterized by the media as "refugees." The characterization was wrong-headed, and yet deeply revealing. Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire traces the long history of this and related terms, like alien and foreign, a rhetorical shorthand that has shortchanged black America for over 250 years.
In tracing the language and politics that have informed debates about African American citizenship, Sanctuary in effect illustrates the historical paradox of African American subjecthood: while frequently the target of legislation (slave law, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow), blacks seldom benefited from the actions of the state. Blackness helped to define social, cultural, and legal aspects of American citizenship in a manner that excluded black people themselves. They have been treated, rather, as foreigners in their home country. African American civil rights efforts worked to change this. Activists and intellectuals demanded equality, but they were often fighting for something even more fundamental: the recognition that blacks were in fact human beings. As citizenship forced acknowledgement of the humanity of African Americans, it thus became a gateway to both civil and human rights.
Waligora-Davis shows how artists like Langston Hughes underscored the power of language to define political realities, how critics like W.E.B. Du Bois imagined democratic political strategies, and how they and other public figures have used their writing as a forum to challenge the bankruptcy of a social economy in which the value of human life is predicated on race and civil identity.

On October 19, 1781, General Cornwallis surrendered his British army to the combined American and French forces at Yorktown, Virginia. In addition to ending hostilities, this act represented the close of British colonial rule and the dawn of America's ascent as an independent country and eventual world power. The events of this revolutionary time were the foundation of a growing American identity, and tributes to the sacrifices and victories of these early patriots continue even today. Yorktown, Virginia, has been celebrating the surrender of the British in large, nationally renowned celebrations since its first anniversary. Local author Kathleen Manley chronicles the history of Yorktown and the victory celebrations that have been undertaken through the generations to remember this historic time in America's infancy.

Roger Sherman was the only founder to sign the Declaration and Resolves (1774), Articles of Association (1774), Declaration of Independence (1776), Articles of Confederation (1777, 1778), and Constitution (1787). He served on the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence, and he was among the most influential delegates at the Constitutional Convention. As a Representative and Senator in the new republic, he played important roles in determining the proper scope of the national government's power and in drafting the Bill of Rights. Even as he was helping to build a new nation, Sherman was a member of the Connecticut General Assembly and a Superior Court judge. In 1783, he and a colleague revised all of the state's laws. Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic explores Sherman's political theory and shows how it informed his many contributions to America's founding. A central thesis of the work is that Sherman, like many founders, was heavily influenced by Calvinist political thought. This tradition had a significant impact on the founding generation's opposition to Great Britain, and it led them to develop political institutions designed to prevent corruption, promote virtue, and protect rights. Contrary to oft-repeated assertions by jurists and scholars that the founders advocated a strictly secular polity, Mark David Hall argues persuasively that most founders believed Christianity should play an important role in the new American republic.