Jurisprudence

Civil rights history lesson enforces tragedy of racism Medgar Evers, born on July 2, 1925, in Decatur, Mississippi, grew up on a small farm, attended a segregated school, and earned a high school diploma. At 18, he enlisted in the U.S.…
Read More...

Highway helper offered assistance on California roadways as a way to honor an earlier kindness On a winter day in 1966, a teenage driver was, to use his own words, “tom-catting around” in a remote area of Illinois. When a blizzard…
Read More...

As a farm boy in Kansas, Charles Plumb dreamed of flying airplanes. His acceptance by the Naval Academy in 1960 became the first meaningful step towards his ultimate goal. After graduation, he completed flight school and reported to the…
Read More...

As early as 1856, journalists began to refer to baseball as our National Pastime. People all over the country played, watched, and read about a sport supposedly invented in 1839 by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, now the home of…
Read More...

Lessons learned from one of Tennessee's most famous statesmen. The post-World War II baby boomer generation grew up with Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier, starring Fess Parker in the title role: Born on a…
Read More...

Presented with opportunity, a disadvantaged student changes his entire trajectory with one high school basketball game. Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability as to any program…
Read More...

Once upon a time…there were more passenger pigeons in the world than any other bird species. Some experts estimated the total population at between three and five billion when Europeans discovered the Americas. In 1813, French-American…
Read More...

During the 1940s in the American South, Jim Crow laws segregated Americans. “Separate but equal” was the catch phrase. Black people were prohibited from using facilities designated for whites, such as water fountains, the “white section”…
Read More...

If George Washington is the “father of our country” and James Madison the “father of our constitution,” Alexander Hamilton, the top aide to Washington in the Revolutionary War, principal author of the Federalist Papers, and the first…
Read More...

A Knoxville Elegy J.D. Vance’s best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy is a fascinating rendition of how the author, during his youth, somehow survived a family background of alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, and failed relationships to…
Read More...