REMEMBERING Parson Brownlow. “Almost instantly he became known for his delight in insulting prominent men. He’d been an editor for only a year when he was first hanged in effigy in the region’s ‘metropolis,’ Knoxville. He noted that the gesture more than doubled his Knoxville subscribers. He seemed to relish reader reaction. Then and later, outrage was proof that readers were paying attention.” Some things never change. And I like this: “He drew ire, and sometimes gunfire. He was the intended victim of at least two assassination attempts. Shot at through a window as he sat by the hearth in his home, he returned fire.” When he became Governor, “Tennessee enjoyed—some Tennesseans more than others—an ironic status as a former slave state where black citizens had rights never known to most blacks in the free North. Under Brownlow’s administration, Tennessee became one of only six states in the entire union where blacks could vote.”

And, after the Civil War, “Adolph Ochs, the patriarch of the modern New York Times, began his career in Knoxville working for a Brownlow paper.”