Tennessee State Museum

You: The Story is a powerful how-to book for aspiring writers that encourages you to look inward and excavate your own memories in order to discover the authentic voices and compelling details that are waiting to be put on the page. Masterfully weaving in humorous and heartfelt stories from her own life that illustrate an aspect…

In graduate school, Rachel Martin volunteered with a Southern oral history project. One day, she was sent to a small town in Tennessee, in the foothills of the Appalachians, where locals wanted to build a museum to commemorate the events of September 1956, when Clinton High School became the first school in the former Confederacy…

The first book to explore the history of college fight songs as a culturally important phenomenon, From Dixie to Rocky Top zeroes in on the US South, where college football has forged a powerful, quasi-religious sense of meaning and identity throughout the region. Tracing the story of Southeastern Conference (SEC) fight songs from the late nineteenth to the…

The presidential election of 1844 had it all: an unpopular incumbent forced out of the race, a perennial presidential loser, a candidate whose career appeared to be on life support, a long-shot whose political ideology had been transformed by religious conversion, even a political assassination. Out of this collection of contenders emerged James K. Polk,…

Poet, editor, and educator Ciona Rouse is the author of Vantablack, the first chapbook of Third Man Books (2017). Her poetry has appeared in the journals Oxford American, Wildness, Booth, The Account, Still, Talking River, Gabby Journal, Matter: a journal of political poetry and commentary and other publications. She has been featured on NPR Music and has work selected by Ada Limón for the podcast The Slowdown.

The Tigerbelles tells the epic story of the 1960 Tennessee State University all-Black women's track team, which found Olympic glory at the 1960 games in Rome. The author tells a story of desire, success and failure--of beating the odds--against the backdrop of a changing America, but tells it in an intimate way. Readers will come to…

Southern History Remixed: On Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Dilemma of Race is a book about popular music. But it also is a book about southern history. The two are not mutually exclusive. Ultimately, it is an exploration which demonstrates that what occurs in the musical realm does affect and reflect what happens in the historical…

Parasite meets Such a Fun Age in a scorching debut that is as heartbreaking as it is thrilling, examining the intersection of race, class, and female friendship, and the devastating consequences of everyday actions. After her best friend’s mysterious death, Elizabeth Smith’s picture-perfect life in the Memphis suburbs has spiraled out of control—so much so that she hires a…