Knox Pods

When Jimmy Hoffa said to Frank Sheeran "I heard you paint houses," they both understood the code—to paint a house is to kill a man. Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett gives his take on the book "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa by Charles Brandt (recorded October 19, 2016). This compelling history...

Dr. Annette Mendola responds to Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande in this podcast of a Books Sandwiched In program (recorded June 22, 2016). Dr. Mendola comments, "The American healthcare system has ardently pursued heroic, lifesaving technologies. It has been less invested in helping people preserve the things that matter most to them in life, such as mobility, re...

The Honorable Pamela Reeves reviews Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World by Linda Hirshman in this recording. Hirshman’s dual biography includes revealing stories of how these trailblazers fought for their own recognition in a male-dominated profession—battles that would ultimately benefit every American woman. She also mak...

Dr. Suzie Allard offers a researcher's viewpoint on Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger. Whether it is used by the National Security Agency to fight terrorism or by online retailers to predict customers’ buying patterns, big data is a revolution occurring around us, in the process of forever changing economics, science, culture, and t...

Between the World and Me is a letter that Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his adolescent son about how to be Black in America. Coates tells his son, “This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it." Pivoting from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, he offers a...

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming  by Bjørn Lomborg is the subject of this discussion led by Renée Hoyos, Executive Director of the Tennessee Clean Water Network. In  Cool It , Lomborg takes a conservative approach to climate change, arguing that many of the elaborate and staggeringly expensive actions now being considered to meet the challenges of global warming ul...

The catastrophic explosion of Fraterville mine in Coal Creek, TN killed 184 men and boys. Robby Griffith and Craig Smith read the May 20, 1902 front-page coverage, and Derek Washington sings a song based on some letters written by miners trapped without hope of rescue. Steve Cotham discusses the importance and dangers of coal mining.

This episode is based on three articles telling of violent events between Union and Confederate sympathizers during and just after the Civil War, both involving the prominent Baker family whose home is now known as the Baker Peters House. The first event is the shooting death of Dr. Harvey Baker in his home, and the second is the lynching of his son in downtown Knoxville. Steve Cotham follows the...

Dr. Dan Terpstra summarizes a vast amount of research found in  This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein. "The good news in this book is that the climate crisis has created our best opportunity yet to reinvent capitalism to work for the needs of society instead of the profits of corporations," Terpstra says. Klein argues that climate change is an alarm that calls us to fi...

Nate Allen, Knoxville's Deputy Chief of Police, was invited to discuss 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman by Adam Plantinga. Allen remarked "This book is a great way to build understanding and transparency between the community and police officers. It is extremely important for the community to know and understand the laws provided for police officers to perform th...

Mark Stephens is passionate about criminal defense and how our system of justice often fails in his response to the book  Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson.   Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative , a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and childre...

Suzanne Supplee is the author of Artichoke's Heart and When Irish Guys Are Smiling . Supplee visited on May 24, 2010 and read from her book  Somebody Everybody Listens To , the story of a girl blessed with a beautiful voice and big dreams of leaving her tiny Tennessee hometown. With a beaten down car, a pocketful of hard-earned waitressing money, and stars in her eyes, Retta Lee Jones sets out to...

Dr. J.C. Tumblin led a walking tour of historic Fountain City on September 14, 2009 for the organization Fountain City Town Hall. You can listen and follow along with the map and illustrations in the tour booklet . We begin and end in Fountain City Park.

Saidiya Hartman tells of her journey to Ghana to reckon with the lives undone by slavery in  Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route . Michelle Commander, University of Tennessee Assistant Professor of English and Africana, discusses the book in this podcast. " Lose Your Mother traces transatlantic slavery’s continued impact on the author and Black Americans in general," Command...

In 1910 the city of Knoxville prepared to receive half a million visitors (so it was hoped) to the Appalachian Exposition. How would the crowds be transported to the grounds? What would they see? Would they show up? The selected reading anticipates a successful exposition with details about railway preparations and buildings.

In August of 1932 a party of nine members of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club made what they believed to be the first continuous hike from one end of what would become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the other. Among the company was Harvey Broome—for whom the local chapter of the Sierra Club is named—and Carlos Campbell, who chronicled the adventure in his memoir, Memories of Old Smoky ....

John Sevier died on September 24, 1815, while on a mission in the territory of Alabama. In 1889 his remains were removed from an Alabama cotton field and brought to Knoxville for burial on the courthouse lawn. The newspaper articles for this episode describe in detail the excavation of the grave, the pageantry of Sevier Day, the gathering of dignitaries, and the pride of Knoxvillians in dischargin...

Mark Campen expresses the importance of farmer's markets in discussing the book Gaining Ground: A Story Of Farmers' Markets, Local Food, And Saving The Family Farm by Forrest Pritchard. Pritchard grew up on a farm but didn’t know much about farming. Fresh out of college with a degree in English and geology, he decided he could save the family farm from financial ruin, a farm his parents have been...

On a rainy October day in 1882, a shotgun blast ripped across Gay Street showering bystanders with stray shot and bringing instant death to the intended target, General Joseph A. Mabry. A volley of shots followed. After their echos faded, the gathered crowd was shocked to find three corpses in the street, several men and a horse wounded, and two men under arrest. One corpse was that of a prominent...

Robert J. Booker has been a civil rights leader, teacher, state legislator, historian, newspaper columnist, and Knoxville City Council member. In this program offered by the East Tennessee Historical Society, he spoke to a group of history teachers about his involvement in lunch counter sit-ins in Knoxville during the civil rights movement. (Recorded in July, 2009)

For three days in October of 1890, Knoxville hosted an enormous reunion of Confederate and Union soldiers near the site of Fort Sanders. The visitors nearly doubled the city's population, and they all needed places to sleep, and food. How did Knoxville step up to the challenge? What did the veterans do at the reunion?

Elizabeth Rowland, Executive Director of TN-China Network , discusses Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos in this Books Sandwiched In podcast. Modern day China is experiencing a great collision: the clash between the elevation of the individual and the Communist Party's struggle to retain control. The New Yorker ’s Evan Osnos has seen the clash first h...

In 1922, Knoxville Aero Corporation was the proud owner of the first privately-owned aeroplane in the city, christened Airship Knoxville. We read an article about one of the corporation's efforts to find a commercial application for their cutting-edge investment—that of running charter flights into the Smokies.

We read news of a Wild West-style shootout in Knoxville with an actual Wild West bandit. Kid Curry was one of the most wanted criminals, a cohort of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. After participating in the Great Northern Train Robbery, he hid out in Knoxville until one evening he got into fisticuffs in a Bowery pool hall. Police arrived on the scene, and in the exchange of gunfire the bandit...

This podcast episode tells the strange and sad story of how an elephant came to be executed in Erwin, TN in 1916 for killing her handler. The reading is an abridgment of an article entitled “The hanging of Mary, a circus elephant,” by Thomas Burton published in Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin , volume 37, number 1, March 1971 (used by permission; all rights reserved). The full article is avail...