Tennessee historical timeline

Before European contact, the region that became Tennessee was Cherokee homeland in the east, with Chickasaw, Muscogee and other Indigenous nations elsewhere in the state; Tennessee's own name descends from Tanasi, a Cherokee town. What is now Tennessee was initially part of North Carolina, and the 1772 Watauga Association, a frontier pact among early settlers, is generally regarded as the first constitutional government west of the Appalachian Mountains. Tennessee was admitted to the United States on 1 June 1796 as the 16th state. In 1838, the Cherokee were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands along the Trail of Tears, part of a wider Indian Removal that displaced roughly 60,000 people from the "Five Civilized Tribes"; thousands died of exposure, disease and starvation.

Tennessee earned the nickname "The Volunteer State" during the War of 1812 and cemented it during the Mexican-American War, when the state sent over 30,000 volunteer soldiers after the federal government asked for 2,800. Tennessee was the last state to formally secede and join the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War in 1861; with Nashville occupied by federal forces from 1862, it became the first state restored to the United States during Reconstruction, and East Tennessee remained a Southern Unionist stronghold throughout the war. Chattanooga saw major fighting in 1863 as federal forces under Ulysses S. Grant broke the Confederate siege of the city. After 1900, the state's agrarian economy diversified, aided by the Tennessee Valley Authority, created by Congress in 1933 as part of the New Deal to bring electricity, flood control and economic development to the region. Memphis became a central site of the civil rights movement, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. there on 4 April 1968 remains one of the movement's defining, tragic moments, now memorialized at the National Civil Rights Museum.