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William F. Yardley, an influential and powerful advocate for the legal rights of blacks, was the first African American to run for governor of Tennessee. Yardley was born in 1844, the child of a white mother and a black father…

Epidemic diseases caused great concern for nineteenth-century Tennesseans. Subject to outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, and dysentery, people lived with the stark reality of disease-induced death, especially in the growing urban areas where sanitation was often poor. For residents of West…

Henderson Yoakum was a Jacksonian stalwart in Middle Tennessee during the tumultuous political battles of the 1830s and 1840s. This native Tennessean later became an important personal and political confidant of Texas Governor Sam Houston and wrote the first comprehensive…

When Sergeant Alvin C. York returned to the United States in 1919 as the best-known hero of the World War, he devoted his attention to improving education in rural Tennessee. York's tenure in the military and service overseas made him…

Congressional Medal of Honor winner and hero of World War I, Alvin C. York was born in Pall Mall. The oldest of eleven children in a family of subsistence farmers, York was a semiskilled laborer when he was drafted into…

The Yuchi Indians are a North American Indian tribe belonging to the Southeastern Indian cultural group. Ethnohistorians indicate that during the historic period there were three principal bands of Yuchi: one on the Tennessee River, one in west Florida, and…