Ron Ahrens, age 10, of Chattanooga, Tenn., for his question:
HOW DID TENNESSEE GET ITS NAME?
Tennessee entered the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state. The name of the state is taken from the Tennessee River, the name of which is derived from that of a Cherokee Indian village, called Tanasie. Tanasie in Cherokee means “crooked ears,” or more simply “crooked ears” or more simply “crooked river”
Tennessee is called the Volunteer State.
Until the mid 20th century, Tennessee had an agricultural economy. Manufacturing has become important during this century.
Nashville is Tennessee's capital city and it is also noted as a center of country and western music. Memphis, the state's largest city, was a major site for the development of blues and jazz music.
Tennessee has a growing population. The official Census of 1980 shows that there were more than 4.5 million inhabitants, an increase of 16.9 percent over 1970.
The first people to live in the area were the prehistoric Mound Builders. Then several Indian tribes hunted in and claimed portions of the area now constituting Tennessee. Chief among these tribes were the Shawnee, who abandoned the area before the Europeans arrived; the Chickasaw, who claimed the western part but did not live there; the Creek, who hunted in the midsection; and the Cherokee, who claimed the central and eastern areas but only lived east of the Holston and Tennessee rivers, mainly along and south of the Little Tennessee River.
The Tennessee area was explored by the Spanish in the mid 16th century and by the English and French in the late 17th century.
Hunters began crossing the mountains from the British colonies on the Atlantic coast in the 1760s and they were soon followed by permanent settlers. By the 1770s, many families had settled from Virginia and North Carolina.
North Carolina gained control over the region in 1788, then ceded it to the United States government, which organized it as the Southwest Territory in 1790.
Much of the frontier Indian fighting in Tennessee ended with the Revolution. An extended struggle continued for title to Indian lands. By a series of treaties between 1770 and 1835, the state gradually acquired all of the disputed territory and the Indians were forced to move farther west.
Tennessee sided with the South in the sectional controversy preceding the American Civil War but tried to avoid secession, giving its electoral vote to the Constitutional Union Party in the crucial election of 1880.
When hostilities broke out between the North and the South the following year, Tennessee went into the Confederacy.
Tennessee was a principal Civil War battleground. Major battles were fought at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Franklin and Nashville.
The Tennessee Unionist Andrew Johnson was military governor of the occupied state from 1862 until 1865, when he became vice president and later president of the United States.