Once again, Louise Littleton Davis has produced from her store of knowledge and understanding of Tennessee history a collection of engrossing stories about the people and events that went into the making of that great state. This book spans two centuries, from pre-Revolutionary days into the 1800s. The reader will now meet many more of early Tennessee's colorful characters, often in unexpected places. Pious and profane, noble and notorious, all of these historical figures emerge as real men and women who worked, fought, and prayed a young state into being. Accounts of incredible land deals dramatize the tragedy of American Indians pushed west by the white man's greed. Tribute is paid to John Ross, the most notable of all Cherokee chiefs, whose lifelong struggle for the rights of the Indians ended with the infamous "Trail of Tears," a death march for many of the 17,000 Cherokees forced by U.S. Army troops to walk from Tennessee to Oklahoma. Frontier criminal justice, shocking by today's standards, reveals a rugged society that considered horse thievery worse than murder and administered punishment accordingly. The strict, often harsh, religious structure that ruled frontier communities is reflected in accounts of church trials concerning many matters now handled by civil courts. Tennessee was not without its dissidents, however. Colonel Thomas Butler defied an Army order to trim his ponytail locks. Ironically, the hero of the Revolutionary War found that his appeals for support to Washington met the same resistance as did the Cherokees' pleas for their land.

This fun colorful, and superbly informative book teaches children about numbers using recognizable places, events, and facts from the state of Tennessee.

The monster fish sighted in Watauga and Boone Lakes, the so-called Wampas Cat, and a witchy horse that found a little lost girl wandering on Embreeville Mountain—these are but a few of the stories retold in this book of East Tennessee tales. Other stories include the Cherokee legends of creation and fire, a witch who drove people mad, a personal account of a miraculous cure, lost civilizations in the middle of Cherokee National Forest, and a host of death and burial superstitions.

Perhaps it is the abundance of decaying mansions that harbor dark and sinister secrets, or perhaps it is Tennessee's tragic heritage of war and defeat, or it may just be the love of a good story that accounts for the fact that Tennessee is steeped in strange tales.

Battle at Peters Place; Civil War Hospitals; Pope's Tavern; Florence Civil War Military Fort; Biffle; General Forrest; Celtic Kirk; General Sterling alexander Martin Wood; Colonel Cornyn; Sweetwater Plantation; Wildwood Plantation; Tick Island; Gravely Springs; Samuel Sinclair; Florence Wesleyan University; Court Street, Florence, Alabama; W. C. Handy; Federal Navy at Florence; Colonel Richard Orric Pickett; Hood; TVA Reservation; Blackberry Trail Golf Course; Sherman; Four Mile Branch; Happy Hollow; Alabama's Federal Cavalry; Lamb's Ferry; Wheeler crossing of the Tennessee; General Edward A. O'Neal; General James Deshler; John Gregg from La Grange; Nelson McCuan; Captain Alexander Coffee, Argoyne; Pvt. William A. Lundy; and many more people and events.

This definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short-story volumes published during Williams’ lifetime with previously unpublished or uncollected stories. Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."