Memphis Tennessee History & Facts

Memphis is a city in the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is the seat of Shelby County in the southwest part of the state and is situated along the Mississippi River. With a population of 633,104 at the 2020 U.S. census, Memphis is the second-most populous city in Tennessee, after Nashville. It is the fifth-most populous city in the Southeast, the nation's 28th-largest overall, and the largest city bordering the Mississippi River. The Memphis metropolitan area includes West Tennessee and the greater Mid-South region, which includes portions of neighboring Arkansas, Mississippi, and the Missouri Bootheel. One of the more historic and culturally significant cities of the southern U.S., Memphis has a wide variety of landscapes and distinct neighborhoods.

The first European explorer to visit the area of present-day Memphis was Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1541. The high Chickasaw Bluffs protecting the location from the waters of the Mississippi was contested by Spanish, French, and English colonizers as Memphis developed. By 1819, when modern Memphis was founded, it was part of United States territory. John Overton, James Winchester, and Andrew Jackson founded the city. Based on the wealth of cotton plantations and river traffic along the Mississippi, Memphis grew into one of the largest cities of the Antebellum South. After the American Civil War and the end of slavery, the city continued to grow into the 20th century. It became among the largest world markets for cotton and lumber.

Home to Tennessee's largest African-American population, Memphis played a prominent role in the American Civil Rights Movement. Leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated here in 1968 after activities supporting a strike by the city's maintenance workers. The National Civil Rights Museum was established there and is a Smithsonian affiliate institution.

Since the civil rights era, Memphis has become one of the nation's leading commercial centers in transportation and logistics. The largest employer is FedEx, which maintains its global air hub at Memphis International Airport. This is now the busiest cargo airport in the world. The International Port of Memphis also hosts the fifth-busiest inland water port in the U.S. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network considers Memphis a "Sufficiency" level global city as of 2020.

Occupying a substantial bluff rising from the Mississippi River, the site of Memphis has been a natural location for human settlement by varying indigenous cultures over thousands of years. In the first millennium A.D. people of the Mississippian culture were prominent; the culture influenced a network of communities throughout the Mississippi River Valley and its tributaries. The hierarchical societies built complexes with large earthwork ceremonial and burial mounds as expressions of their sophisticated culture. The Chickasaw people, believed to be their descendants, later inhabited this site and a large territory in the Southeast.

French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto encountered the historic Chickasaw in this area in the 16th century.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 324.0 square miles (839.2 km2), of which 315.1 square miles (816.0 km2) is land and 9.0 square miles (23.2 km2), or 2.76%, is water.

Famous Peoples From Memphis Tennessee

Ginnifer Goodwin

Jennifer Michelle "Ginnifer" Goodwin (born May 22, 1978) is an American actress. She is known for her starring role as Margene Heffman in the HBO drama series Big Love (2006–2011) and Snow White / Mary Margaret Blanchard in the ABC fantasy series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018).

Goodwin has appeared in various films, including the drama Mona Lisa Smile (2003), the musical biopic Walk the Line (2005), the romantic comedy He's Just Not That Into You (2009), the family comedy Ramona and Beezus (2010), the romantic comedy Something Borrowed (2011), and the biopic Killing Kennedy (2013). She also voiced the lead role of Fawn in the Disney animated fantasy film Tinker Bell and the Legend of the Neverbeast (2014) and Judy Hopps in the Disney animated comedy film Zootopia (2016).

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