Dayton

The Rhea County Courthouse, located in Dayton, Tennessee was the scene of the Scopes Trial of July 1925, in which teacher John T. Scopes faced... charges for including Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in his public school lesson. The trial became a clash of titans between the lawyers William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, and epitomizes the tension between fundamentalism and modernism in a wide range of aspects of American society. A $1-million project which restored the second-floor courtroom to the way it looked during the Scopes trial was completed in 1979. The Rhea County Museum, also called the Scopes Trial Museum, is located in its basement and contains such memorabilia as the microphone used to broadcast the trial, trial records, photographs, and an audiovisual history of the trial. Every July local people re-enact key moments of the trial in the courtroom.
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Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong was an African American string band and country blues musician, who played fiddle, mandolin, and guitar and also... sang. He was also a notable visual artist and raconteur. William Howard Taft Armstrong was born in Dayton, Tennessee, and grew up in LaFollette, Tennessee. As a young teenager he taught himself to play the fiddle, and joined a band led by Blind Roland Martin and his brother Carl. They toured the United States performing a wide range of music, from work songs and spirituals through popular Tin Pan Alley tunes and foreign language songs. In 1929 he recorded with Sleepy John Estes and Yank Rachell. The following year he recorded in Knoxville for Vocalion Records, with his brother Roland Armstrong and Carl Martin, billed as the Tennessee Chocolate Drops. Adding guitarist Ted Bogan, the band toured as part of a medicine show and backed blues musicians such as Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Minnie. As Martin, Bogan and Armstrong, they also performed at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago.
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Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. Tennessee is the 36th most extensive and the 17th most populous of the 50 United States. Tennessee is bordered by Kentucky and Virginia to the north, North Carolina to the east, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the south, and Arkansas and Missouri to the west. The Appalachian Mountains dominate the eastern part of the state, and the Mississippi River forms the state's... western border. Tennessee's capital and second largest city is Nashville, which has a population of 626,144. Memphis is the state's largest city, with a population of 670,902. The state of Tennessee is rooted in the Watauga Association, a 1772 frontier pact generally regarded as the first constitutional government west of the Appalachians. What is now Tennessee was initially part of North Carolina, and later part of the Southwest Territory. Tennessee was admitted to the Union as the 16th state on June 1, 1796. Tennessee was the last state to leave the Union and join the Confederacy at the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, and the first state to be readmitted to the Union at the end of the war.
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