Displaying items by tag: jack neely
Before FDR, the artists and the auto dealers: How Knoxville influenced early days of Great Smokies park campaign
Knoxville History Project observes 100th anniversary of a key meeting and month in Great Smoky Mountains history
KNOXVILLE — Parts of the mountains were broken, but it was all beautiful, and many artists and writers long took careful note of the rugged, remote rainforest to the southeast of the city.
Decades before modern scientific endeavors like the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory began documenting the wondrous, mountainous biodiversity of what was to become Great Smoky Mountains National Park, photographers, writers, journalists, naturalists and artists, including many from Knoxville, extolled the virtues of the relatively lofty blue-green mountains seen in silhouette from the city.
Much of the land was scarred by logging and erosion; much was not, and its beauty, frozen in a frame or penned to a page, spoke for itself through countless artists.
Their early 20th-century renderings of the Smokies, from prose to photographs, amazed critical federal officials and the public and helped close the complex deal on what is now the most visited national park in the United States.
The Knoxville History Project is offering a series of events and symposium set for July 25-27, centered around the East Tennessee History Center on Gay Street, that will recognize the varied efforts of historical Knoxvillians to boost the concept of the national park through multimedia arts, science and journalism.
- tennessee archive of moving image & sound
- great smoky mountains conservation association
- great smoky mountains national park
- jim thompson
- sept 2, 1940
- all taxa biodiversity inventory
- knoxville history project
- east tennessee history center
- smokies national park campaign
- smokies history
- birth of a national park in the smokies
- eric dawson
- stark love
- central cinema
- bijou theater
- mcclung historical collection
- jack neely
- dedication of great smoky mountains national park
- when did smokies open?
- wbir
- carlos campbell
- ijams nature center
- franklin d roosevelt
- alum cave
- mt leconte
- mountain view hotel
Cormac McCarthy, a beautiful chronicler of our darkest and best hearts who drew from his Knoxville roots, dies at 89
‘A malign star kept him:’ McCarthy offered a fever-dream toast to Knoxville’s frontier river town roots
KNOXVILLE — Cormac McCarthy, the onetime Knoxvillian who rose from obscurity to the heights of fame by penning some of the most violent works in the Western literary canon, died Tuesday, June 13 at his home in New Mexico.
McCarthy was considered by some critics to be America’s greatest living author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 novel “The Road.” Another novel, “All The Pretty Horses,” won the National Book Award in 1992 and a movie made from his book “No Country For Old Men” won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Picture.
The novelist studied at the University of Tennessee and became an infamous recluse who lived at points in a dairy barn and an RV. He rarely gave interviews, and was known to prefer the company of scientists to that of other writers.
McCarthy admired the works of Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky and William Faulkner, and he is the only Knoxvillian to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction other than James Agee. His work was often divisive, however, as his relentlessly masculine and unsentimental outlook led him to plumb the depths of human desperation and depravity through characters such as cannibals, necrophiliacs and mass murderers.
His literary vision focused on humankind’s cosmic insignificance by pitting rough-hewn men against primordial nature on a succession of vividly realized stages carved from history and myth. Faulkner might have said the only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself, but McCarthy opined that serious authors should focus on the struggle of life against death.
According to Knoxville historian Jack Neely, McCarthy drew heavily from his surroundings, especially in the vivid depictions of Knoxville contained in “Suttree.”
“The descriptions of Market Square, in both “Suttree” and his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” are dense, accurate, unsparing and poetic,” Neely said. “I quoted them in my Market Square book, and a passage from ‘Suttree’ is engraved in marble in the middle of the square.
“One, from Suttree, ostensibly from a day in 1951, could have described a scene I witnessed there last week: ‘He went among vendors and beggars and wild street preachers haranguing a lost world with a vigor unknown to the sane.’”
Neely also singled out another passage that comes just paragraphs later, where McCarthy describes the old Market House: “Where brick the color of dried blood rose turreted and cupolaed and crazed into the heat of the day form on form in demented accretion without precedent or counterpart in the annals of architecture.”
- cormac mccarthy
- cormac mccarthy knoxville
- suttree
- sutree landing
- sutree
- suttree landing park
- suttree knoxville
- jj stambaugh
- corman mccarthy dead
- suttree park
- jack neely
- knoxville history
- knoxville history project
- no country for old men
- all the pretty horses
- blood meridian
- mccarthy’s olivetti typewriter
- mccarthy obituary
Earth Day is every day, but especially this Saturday
Earth Day activities have cooled in Knoxville over the decades. The planet has not.
KNOXVILLE — It’s been 52 years since the modern environmental movement was born on what is now known around the world as Earth Day.
Now reckoned to be the world’s largest secular observance, Earth Day is the climax of Earth Week (April 16 to 22), which brings together an estimated billion people around the globe working to change human behavior and push for pro-environment economic and legislative action. This year’s theme is “Invest in the planet.”
Events marking Earth Day in Knoxville tend to vary in size and tone from year-to-year, with 2023 providing environmentally minded residents with a number of ways to celebrate Mother Earth.
Perhaps the most memorable of those years was the very first one, when one of the most important voices in the burgeoning environmental movement spoke on the University of Tennessee campus.
Jane Jacobs, who is now recognized as “the godmother of the New Urbanism movement,” gave a lecture to a crowd of nearly 200 people on the topic of “Man and His Environment” at the Alumni Memorial Hall, according to Jack Neely, who heads the Knoxville History Project.
- earth day 2023
- knoxville earth day event
- how can i celebrate earth day
- oak ridge earth day
- south knoxville community cleanup
- keep knoxville beautiful
- department of energy
- jack neely
- knoxville history project
- jj stambaugh
- jane jacobs
- new urbanism
- dogwood arts festival
- University of Tennessee
- marisa tomei
- citizen jane
- habitat for humanity
- restore
- karm
- lyrids meteor shower
- nasa
- southern appalachia
- oak ridge national laboratory
Sam Adams raises trees like healthy children at the University of Tennessee
First campus arborist continues climb up Utree Knoxville
KNOXVILLE — Students at the University of Tennessee walk by hundreds of trees every day without thinking about them.
Sam Adams was thinking about them even before he became UT’s first arborist.
Adams, 58, has cared for trees in the field of arboriculture for decades. He’s worked privately and publicly, including as arborist supervisor for Sarasota County, Florida. He graduated with a degree in environmental studies at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, where he initially pursued a degree in English.
- ut arborist
- ut tree
- sam adams utk
- jim cortese
- trees knoxville
- University of Tennessee
- university of tennessee knoxville
- sam adams
- jack neely
- knoxville history project
- knoxville history
- cortese tree
- keenan thomas
- ut journalism school
- hellbender press ut
- knoxville persimmon
- trees in knoxville
- utk history
- civil war knoxville
- the hill ut
- tree care
- what does an arborist do?
- clearing trees at utk
Requiem for the Lord God Bird
The ivory-billed woodpecker is officially extinct, and it strikes a chord in Knoxville
Clinging to a maple in the bayou, Jim Tanner finally had the rare nestling in his grasp.
He fitted it with a numbered leg band and placed the bird back in its hole high off the ground.
But true to its seldom-seen self, the juvenile ivory-billed woodpecker squirmed free and fluttered to the base of a giant maple tree in a southern Louisiana swamp owned at the time by the Singer Sewing Machine Co.
The year was 1936, and Jim Tanner was in the midst of doctorate research at Cornell University funded by the Audubon Society as part of a push to prevent the pending extinctions of multiple bird species, including the California condor, roseate spoonbill, whooping crane and ivory-billed woodpecker. Eighty-five years later, the regal woodpecker would be the only one grounded for eternity.
In the heat and rain of mucky, gassy bayous, Tanner compiled data on the range, population, habitat and prevalence of ivory-billed woodpeckers. He camped for weeks at a time in the swamps of the birds’ original range.
On this day, his only goal was to band the bird but he rushed down the tree and picked up the agitated but uninjured woodpecker.
He also wanted photographs.
Tanner took advantage of the moment.
He placed the bird upon the shoulder of an accompanying and accommodating game warden for 14 shots from his Leica.
They were probably the first, and perhaps the last, photographs of a juvenile ivory-billed woodpecker photographed by Tanner in its natural habitat. He named the bird Sonny, and he was the only known member of the species to be banded with a number.
The regal, smart, athletic bird, which peaceably flew over its small slice of Earth for some 10,000 years, was declared extinct last month by the Fish and Wildlife Service. Twenty-two other species also qualified for removal from the Endangered Species List — in the worst possible way.
The ivory bill inhabited the swamps of the Deep South, far removed from Rocky Top, but old visages of the departed were found in Little Switzerland in South Knoxville. The work of Tanner, who would go on to complete a rich ecological research career at the University of Tennessee, has been memorialized by a talented East Tennessee science writer.
And the Southern Appalachian region has other long-gone kinships with species that vanished from the Earth a long time ago.
Technical Society of Knoxville Centennial Celebration
Jun 14 6:30 p.m. EST
The Turning Point: Things were never the same after 1921, when technology was changing the city in several surprising ways
Jack Neely, Executive Director of the Knoxville History Project
Technical Society of Knoxville (TSK)
Charity Banquet at Crowne Plaza for the Charles Edward Ferris Engineering Endowments at University of Tennessee, Knoxville - the public is invited - RSVP by June 8
Ferris was the first Dean of UTK’s College of Engineering.
More details on the event, sponsorships, and reservations
The Technical Society of Knoxville was founded in 1921. It has met over 4,000 times to discuss the application of technology from early Knoxville’s coal smoke and traffic problems to present Knoxville’s transportation air pollution and the impact of electric car technologies.