Tennessee, TN

Tennessee is a state located in the Southern United States. In 1796, it became the sixteenth state to join the Union. Tennessee is known as the "Volunteer State", a nickname it earned during the War of 1812, in which volunteer soldiers from Tennessee played a prominent role, especially during the Battle of New Orleans.

The capital city is Nashville, and the largest city is Memphis.

Geography

Tennessee lies adjacent to eight other states: Kentucky and Virginia to the north; North Carolina to the east; Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi on the south; and Arkansas and Missouri on the Mississippi River to the west.

Tennessee ties Missouri as the states bordering the most other states. The state is trisected by the Tennessee River.

The highest point in the state is the peak of Clingmans Dome at 6,643 feet (2,025 m), which lies on Tennessee's eastern border, and is the highest point on the Appalachian Trail.

The lowest point is the Mississippi River at the Mississippi state line.

The geographical center of the state is located in Murfreesboro on Old Lascassas Pike (just down the road from Middle Tennessee State University) and is marked by a roadside monument.

The state of Tennessee is geographically and constitutionally divided into three Grand Divisions: East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and West Tennessee. Tennessee features six principal physiographic regions: the Blue Ridge, the Appalachian Ridge and Valley Region, the Cumberland Plateau, the Highland Rim, the Nashville Basin, and the Gulf Coastal Plain.

Climate

Most of the state has a humid subtropical climate, with the exception of the higher mountains, which have a humid continental climate.

The Gulf of Mexico is the dominant factor in the climate of Tennessee, with winds from the south being responsible for most of the state's annual precipitation. Generally the state has hot summers and mild to cool winters with generous precipitation throughout the year.

On average the state receives 50 inches (130 cm) of precipitation throughout the year. Snowfall ranges from 5 inches (13 cm) in West Tennessee to over 16 inches (41 cm) in the higher mountains in East Tennessee.

Summers in the state are generally hot, with most of the state averaging a high of around 90 °F (32 °C) during the summer months. Summer nights tend to be cooler in East Tennessee.

Winters tend to be mild to cool, increasing in coolness at higher elevations and in the east. Generally, for areas outside the highest mountains, the average overnight lows are near freezing for most of the state.

Tennessee does have its share of severe weather. While the state is far enough from the coast to avoid any direct impact from a hurricane, the location of the state makes it likely to be impacted from the remnants of tropical cyclones which weaken over land and eventually dump tremendous amounts of rain.

The state averages around 50 days of thunderstorms per year, and some of them can be quite severe. Tornadoes are not uncommon, with West Tennessee slightly more vulnerable to tornadoes.

On average, the state has 15 tornadoes per year. Tornadoes in Tennessee can be severe, and Tennessee leads the nation in the percentage of total tornadoes which have fatalities.

Winter storms are an occasional problem—made worse by a lack of snow removal equipment and a population which might not be accustomed to travel in large amounts of snow—although ice storms are a more likely occurrence.

Fog is a persistent problem in parts of the state, especially in much of the Smoky Mountains.

History

The area now known as Tennessee was first settled by Paleo-Indians nearly 11,000 years ago. The names of the cultural groups that inhabited the area between first settlement and the time of European contact are unknown, but several distinct cultural phases have been named by archaeologists, including Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian, whose chiefdoms were the cultural predecessors of the Muscogee people who inhabited the Tennessee River Valley prior to Cherokee migration into the river's headwaters.

When Spanish explorers first visited the area, led by Hernando de Soto in 1539–43, it was inhabited by tribes of Muscogee and Yuchi people. Possibly because of European diseases devastating the Native tribes, which would have left a population vacuum, and also from expanding European settlement in the north, the Cherokee moved south from the area now called Virginia.

As European colonists spread into the area, the native populations were forcibly displaced to the south and west, including all Muscogee and Yuchi peoples, the Chickasaw, and Choctaw.

Early during the American Revolutionary War, Fort Watauga at Sycamore Shoals (in present day Elizabethton) was attacked in 1776 by Dragging Canoe and his warring faction of Cherokee (also referred to by settlers as the Chickamauga) opposed to the Transylvania Purchase and aligned with the British Loyalists.

The lives of many settlers were spared through the warnings of Dragging Canoe's cousin Nancy Ward. The frontier fort on the banks of the Watauga River later served as a 1780 staging area for the Overmountain Men in preparation to trek over the Great Smoky Mountains, to engage, and to later defeat the British Army at the Battle of Kings Mountain in North Carolina. Eight counties of western North Carolina (and now part of Tennessee) broke off from that state in the late 1780s and formed the abortive State of Franklin.

Efforts to obtain admission to the Union failed, and the counties had re-joined North Carolina by 1790. North Carolina ceded the area to the federal government in 1790, after which it was organized into the Southwest Territory.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tennessee".