Christopher Caplinger

Gerald Foley, union organizer and president of the Tennessee Federation of Labor, was a native of Pennsylvania. Foley's family moved to Nashville when he was a boy. A plumber by trade, he joined organized labor while still in his teens…

Labor organizer, lobbyist, and administrator Matthew S. Lynch was the grandson of an organizer of New England shoe workers. Lynch began working in a Chattanooga hosiery mill and joined his first union as a teenager. In 1934 he graduated from…

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…