Book Review

Although many books have been written about Tennessee and Tennesseans, there are few good one-volume histories of the state. Indeed, for over thirty years Robert Corlew's Tennessee: A Short History (1969, 1990) has been the work of choice for students, teachers, and many general readers. Undoubtedly with this in mind, the University of Tennessee professors Paul H. Bergeron and Stephen V. Ash and the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania professor Jeanette Keith have written what they describe as "an up-to-date history of Tennessee . . . that takes into account the wealth of new evidence about the state's past unearthed by historians in recent years."	1
The work is chronologically organized into thirteen chapters, with the longest and best of those, "Antebellum Politics, Economy, and Society," running forty pages. The text is crisp, clean, and precise, and there are numerous well-chosen illustrations and interesting sidebars that briefly describe key people and events that are part of the state's past. There are also short introductory synopses for the chapters, and, with one noticeable exception ("Frontier Times"), current bibliographies at the end of them.	2
Some of the writing is perspicacious and clever. Progressivism in Tennessee was "an attitude that evolved into a political stance." "Nothing symbolizes Tennesseans' ambivalent attitudes toward modern times better than the image of an urban factory worker spending money to buy a victrola, so that he could play records that reminded him of the music he had grown up hearing back on the farm."	. . .