For more than 150 years, East Tennesseans have experienced disasters of historic proportions. The 1902 Fraterville Mine explosion took the lives of 216 men and boys. A 1904 head-on passenger train wreck in New Market claimed the lives of 64. In 1906, Jellico was practically destroyed by the explosion of a train car loaded with dynamite. Floodwaters near Rockwood in 1929 took the lives of 7 Boy Scouts and their Scoutmaster. An explosion in 1960 at...

Stepping through time to past and present communities, settled in deep hollows and surrounded by ridges and mountains in Tennessee's Appalachia, is to confront a different and disappearing realm. Travel along Hogskin and Richland Valleys. Visit Frenches Mill and Dulaney General Store while passing cantilever barns, one-room school buildings and steepled churches. Listen as octogenarians Robert, Charles, Glenn and others explain life without electricity....

"No one knows where the Tufa came from, or how they ended up in the mountains of East Tennessee. When the first Europeans came to the Smoky Mountains, the Tufa were already there. Dark-haired and enigmatic, they live quietly in the hills and valleys of Cloud County, their origins lost to history. But there are clues in their music, hidden in the songs they have passed down for generations. . . . Private Bronwyn Hyatt, a true daughter of the Tufa,...

Ten-year-old Grace is in search of a subject for her fifth-grade history project when she learns that her four times-great grandfather once stabbed his lover to death. His grisly act was memorialised in a murder ballad, her aunt tells her, so it must be true. But the lessons of that revelation - to be careful of men, and desire - are not just Grace's to learn. Her family's tangled past is part of a dark legacy in which the lives of generations of...

The son of an unknown father and an ostracized mother, and the next of kin in a long line of bastard relatives, nine-year-old Loren Garland lives a life of subtle mystery beneath the shadow of an East Tennessee mountain. It is on his family's broken-down estate that Loren's imagination grows, and with it, the extraordinary voice of "Bitter Milk," a young boy named Luther who may be Loren's imaginary friend, his conscience, or his evil twin. And yet...

A compilation of 255 brief articles on East Tennessee people, places, institutions, events, and other subjects, from James Agee to Alvin York, including country music, Ford Loudoun, and the Scopes trial.