Columnist
Michael Nelson is contributing editor and columnist for The Daily Memphian, the political analyst for WMC-TV, and the Fulmer professor of political science at Rhodes College. His latest books are “Trump: The First Two Years” and “The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2018.”
73 articles by Michael Nelson :
In 1831, the French traveler watched a federal agent load a band of Choctaw Indians onto a ship for transport to Arkansas, a vanguard of the Trail of Tears. “In the whole of this spectacle,” Tocqueville observed, “there was an air of ruin and destruction, something that felt like a final farewell with no returning.”
Stern cared deeply about both civil rights and bringing the NBA to mid-size cities where the basketball team would be one of the biggest things in town. For Stern, that combination equaled Memphis.
Even more remarkable than Hanover’s role in suffrage ratification was the rest of his life.
The Memphis congressman is the fourth most senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which wrote the two articles that are the basis of the Senate trial. But Cohen’s peers tend to regard him as a grandstander rather than a team player.
In none of the past three elections – 2012, 2016, and now 2020 – has anyone given a thought to the possibility that the next president might come from Tennessee.
The senator has focused relentlessly on education and health policy, working to enact the sort of important legislation that Congress is supposed to deal with instead of attacking or defending the president’s conduct.
Gay, black and much, much more, Saeed Jones defies prevailing stereotypes.
The FedEx founder’s story is one every Memphian of a certain age has heard. But it’s a story – like the Christmas story – that never gets old. And like that story, it lies at the intersection of history and legend.
In addition to both being Andrews from Tennessee, Jackson and Johnson were among the earliest presidents to be the targets of assassination plots.
When his song “Green Onions” was racing up the charts, Booker T. Jones was a freshman at Indiana University Music School, coming home every weekend so the MG's could seize the moment by recording an album.
When the presidential debate is held in Tennessee next year, will Joe Biden face off with Donald Trump? The new book “Barack and Joe” presents the potential Democratic nominee as a “rare blend of moderate thinking and immoderate decency.”
The Legislature made the decision — unique among all the states in the country — that sports betting will be an online-only activity. Tennesseans and tourists won’t need to go anywhere in particular to gamble. They’ll just need their phones.
The founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, Ibram X. Kendi will speak at the National Civil Rights Museum and the University of Memphis. His honesty is an invitation to frank discussion and open debate.
Baseball romanticists often argue that part of the game’s charm is that it is played off the clock. In theory, they like to marvel, a game could last forever. Speaking literally, no game ever has. It just seems like most of them do.
Of the Ghosts of Politics Past that voters turned away, the first was the 79-year-old former mayor, Willie Herenton, who resigned the office in the middle of his fifth term in 2009.
In a country where Election Day almost always falls on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, what possible sense does it make to have our local election on a Thursday in October?
Debates between presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain were held at Belmont in Nashville and Ole Miss in Oxford. Belmont has applied to host another one next fall. Ole Miss thought better of it.
Once you start ignoring the Constitution in order to achieve some immediate political goal, you are placing it in jeopardy. The right way to make changes is to follow the rules of the amendment process spelled out in Article V of the document, which has already happened 27 times in our history.
Las Vegas, like Memphis, is still Elvis' town.
Four of the first six federal officials to be impeached by the House of Representatives were Tennesseans, including the first president ever indicted for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson.
Mississippi Republicans nominated Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, their weaker candidate for governor in Tuesday’s runoff primary. Hood, the state’s four-term attorney general, sailed to victory with 69% of the vote in his party’s Aug. 6 primary.
Memphis decided to bring the best of the urban past into the vitality of the urban present in a minor league ballpark.
The city was the site of two battles during the Civil War, but the worst one came afterward.
Modern-day progressives like to think that progressives from earlier eras were, like them, enlightened about everything. It ain’t so now and it wasn’t so then.
Positive Physics reaches about 13,000 students a year in 50 states and 76 countries. Memphis teacher Jack Replinger writes the problems. Memphis computer scientist Anthony Fizer maintains the site.
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