From local history to supernatural battles: eight books you should read this summer
It’s almost summer, and that means the days pass lazier than the Tennessee River flowing by Chattanooga’s aquarium. School’s out. The days’ hours grow long.
And whether or not you can escape on a vacation to the mountains or the beach, there’s no better time to experiment, try new things, broaden your horizons. It’s time for one of this season’s sweetest traditions: cracking a book and getting lost in story and idea.
What’s better than lingering at a Chattanooga coffee shop, or grabbing a hammock, a bottle of sweet tea, and hanging off the edge of the world soaking in the sun and some text? Locking yourself in your living room away from all the heat is great too. To that end, we’ve compiled a list of books about Chattanooga, titles that explore the city in new ways, that show the deep and dynamic place we call home.
Some of these books are fiction, but more of them are nonfiction, and they tell the true stories that made Chattanooga what it is today, of soldiers, businessmen and Cherokee. Altogether, they paint a picture of this city that’s vaster and more nuanced than what a Wikipedia article could tell.
To help me compile this list beyond my own experience, I reached out to several of Chattanooga’s book experts—the good people at the Southern Lit Alliance, McKay’s and the Chattanooga Public Library—to find the books on Chattanooga that are worth reading.
They did not disappoint.
There were more titles than space to examine them all, but the resulting list aims to show the diversity of subjects when it comes to exploring Chattanooga through the pages of a book. And because we’re not rating titles here, we’ve arranged them in alphabetical order by the authors’ last names.
Old Money, New South: the Spirit of Chattanooga
By Dean W. Arnold
To understand Chattanooga, Dean Arnold writes in his 2006 book Old Money, New South, you must understand the family dynasties that made it what it is today.
Arnold brings a first-person, exploratory journalism style to the subject. “Since I had resolved to discern the spirit of Chattanooga, I determined to interview as many of the leading families as possible,” writes Arnold.
It’s a book that takes readers on a climb up some of the city’s most prominent skyscrapers, and explores the families and the fortunes behind SunTrust Bank and Coca-Cola Bottling, for example.
It’s the Chattanooga aristocracy, Arnold says, that helped bring about the oft-told Chattanooga renaissance, including the Aquarium. Lee Jackson, who sits on the board of the Southern Lit Alliance, wrote, “Dean Arnold’s book really helped me understand Chattanooga when I first moved here in 2008.” He’s not the only one who said Arnold’s book is invaluable for learning how Chattanooga works.
Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor
By Russell S. Bonds
It’s difficult not to see Chattanooga’s history without looking at the Civil War. And one of the most compelling stories to come out of the conflict was The Great Locomotive Chase, that story of a band of union soldiers and civilians who traveled behind enemy lines and stole a steam engine with the intent to whip the iron horse straight into Chatt-town, leaving a trail of cut telegraph wires, blown up bridges and destroyed train tracks in their wake.
There’s plenty of pop-culture knowledge of the raid. Both Disney and silent film icon Buster Keaton made movies of the story. But according to Russell Bonds, the author of Stealing the General, fewer books have examined the primary documents and wove together a definitive account of what actually occurred.
The book begins with a Union Army moving south from Nashville into Alabama and Union sympathizers destroying rail bridges in Knoxville, thus setting the context of the failed raid that abandoned its locomotive two miles north of Ringgold and earning some participants the first Medals of Honor.
Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching that Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism
By Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips, Jr.
Knowing that a man was lynched on the Walnut Street Bridge over 100 years ago—one of the most popular locations in the city to take engagement photos these days—is stark enough.
To see the story advance chapter after chapter in Contempt of Court, to see every twist and turn of Ed Johnson’s legal case, showed that the justice system then is almost unrecognizable to what it is today.
Contempt of Court not only showed the injustice in full, aching detail, but it laid out just why Johnson’s death mattered. For the court case that followed—which put Hamilton County’s sheriff on trial before the Supreme Court of the United States no less—forever changed the legal system in this nation.
For the aftermath of that lynching caused the Supreme Court to flex its power, to demonstrate that it was the highest legal voice in the land.
The Chattanooga Country 1540-1951: From Tomahawks to TVA
by Gilbert Govan and James Livingood
The Chattanooga Country 1540-1951 begins with a scramble up Lookout Mountain to an overlook that showed a mighty river cutting through field and forest, raw and untouched.
The year was 1818 and a minister by the name of Elias Cornelius recorded his impression of seeing this land open up below. It was a view that had remained almost unchanged from 1540, the year the de Soto expedition traveled through the area.
Thus begins Gilbert Govan and James Livingood’s story into their 436-year history of Chattanooga, exploring how it was the gateway to the early frontier, a border town with the Cherokee nation, an epicenter of the Civil War and a key player in an industrializing South. In short, Govan and Livingood believe Chattanooga’s history is a story of something larger than a city.
They tell that story by utilizing a healthy dose of quotes, using the voices of history-makers. Livingood earned his PhD from Princeton and was a longtime history professor at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and this 500-page book is just one of his works on this area.
This sweeping epic of Chattanooga’s history that “is a ‘must read’” according to Southern Lit board member Joe Wilferth.
Chattanooga Walking Tour & Historic Guide
By Maury Nicely
Unlike the other books about Chattanooga, Maury Nicely’s book demands you get up, and explore this place, to stand where history happened.
Chattanooga Walking Tour & Historic Guide recounts sagas of Chattanooga’s history with more than a dozen walking routes around the city.
For example, a walk takes history-lovers to Ross’s Landing, a departure point for the Trail of Tears.
This book gets bonus points in this non-ranked book list because it can double as a low-cost date, a way to get some fresh air and learning, all at the same time. “It’s the ‘go to’ book to explore Chattanooga,” said Mary Helms, history department manager for Chattanooga Public Library.
Executive Director of the Southern Lit Alliance, Lynda LeVan also recommended this book for understanding this city’s history.
The Girl Who Struck Out Babe Ruth
By Jean L. S. Patrick
A book list isn’t complete if we didn’t include at least one children’s book. It’s 1931 and the Chattanooga Lookouts signed Jackie Mitchell, a 17-year-old girl, to play pro baseball.
The Lookouts went up against the New York Yankees with some of its best, most iconic players in baseball and Mitchell was called to pitch.
Don’t be deceived by its 48 pages and first-grade reading level. To create this book, both author and illustrator consulted the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Chattanooga Regional History Museum and the local history department of Chattanooga Public Library.
It’s a reminder that history isn’t all grand wars, migrations and great man theory. Instead, broad histories often pass over the ordinary people who did the weird, wonderful and heroic thing in the lot they were placed—and that includes a moment of Chattanooga’s baseball history.
This title was only one of the many books recommended by Dan Bockert, nonfiction director of McKay’s Chattanooga.
Queen of Wands
By John Ringo
One of the great things about reading fiction about a place you frequent is its ability to infuse the place with a certain quirkiness, transforming the ordinary into something heightened.
Queen of Wands by John Ringo is one of those books. Ringo is a New York Times bestselling author with dozens of books to his name, and a Chattanooga resident to boot.
Queen of Wands is urban fantasy and it follows the adventures of Barbara Everette, Protestant soccer mom turned demon killer.
It’s the second book in a series that started down in New Orleans. This time around, the action moves to Chattanooga where Everette is called in to investigate a series of gruesome murders in Coolidge Park. Her investigation leads her down some very dark pathways…along with visits to a lot of familiar landmarks, including the Bluff View Arts District and a rather well-known girls school just across the river.
For fans of The Pulse, this one is of special interest because a certain “Alex Teach” shows up in the pages of Queen of Wands. Yes, the same Alex (in fictionalized form) who has his regular column in this week’s issue of the paper.
Have you ever needed a seatbelt to read a book? Because this one is quite the ride.
St. Elmo
By Augusta Evans Wilson
St. Elmo, by Augusta Evans Wilson (also known as Augusta J. Evans) is a historical artifact, an obscure story and a piece of fiction with scenes set in Chattanooga. Indeed, the novel is why the St. Elmo neighborhood is named St. Elmo.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, the original developer of St. Elmo was going to name the place East Side (...yawn) before deciding to name it after the popular novel first published in 1866.
St. Elmo is a Victorian romance novel, with the language and plot to match. It follows the heroine Edna Earl, an orphan and aspiring author, as she leaves Chattanooga to live with wealthy benefactors and falls in love with St. Elmo, a duelist and overall bad boy.
Wilson was “considered by some literary historians to be the best known Southern female author of the nineteenth century,” the application for St. Elmo’s inclusion on the historical registry said.
Today, Wilson is more controversial. An ardent supporter of the Confederacy, her books were banned from Union camps.