Tennessee

A dentist in Nashville invented cotton candy. In 1897, Dr. William Morrison teamed up with candy maker John C. Wharton to build a machine that spun melted sugar into thin threads. They called it "fairy floss" and sold nearly 69,000 boxes at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair for 25 cents each.

Cherokee and Chickasaw peoples lived here for thousands of years. In the 1820s, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah created a writing system of 86 symbols for his people's language. Within a few years, the Cherokee had a written constitution, a newspaper, and a literacy rate higher than many white communities around them.

None of it mattered to the U.S. government. In 1838, federal soldiers forced around 17,000 Cherokee from their homes in Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas. About 4,000 died on the march to Oklahoma, a journey the Cherokee call the Trail Where They Cried.

Tennessee became the 16th state in 1796 and sent so many volunteers to the War of 1812 it earned the nickname "the Volunteer State." Three presidents came from here: Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson.

During the Civil War, Tennessee was the last state to leave the Union and the first to come back. The Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 killed or wounded nearly 24,000 soldiers in two days, fought around a tiny church whose name means "place of peace" in Hebrew.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. That motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum.

Hike the Great Smoky Mountains (the most visited national park in the country), tour Sun Studio in Memphis where Elvis cut his first record, and catch a show at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, which has been broadcasting live every weekend since 1925. Try hot chicken at Prince's in Nashville, the place that started it all.