Memphis, in Shelby County, is the largest city in Tennessee. The greater Memphis area, with a population of over 1.2 million, is the biggest metropolitan area in the state, after Nashville. The Memphis area initially belonged to the Chickasaw tribe. Europeans came much later, with a Spanish explorer named Hernando de Soto who is believed to have been in the area in the 1540s. By the late 17th century, French explorers such as Sieur de La Salle and Ren Robert Cavelier constructed Fort Prudhomme in the neighborhood. This was the first European settlement in what was to later become Memphis. Notwithstanding the settlements, Memphis as we know today was an uncultured area for the greater part of the 18th Century. By 1796, the Memphis community was the extreme west point of the newly inducted state of Tennessee. Memphis was integrated as a city in 1826, deriving its name from the ancient Egyptian capital. At the culmination of the Battle of Memphis in 1862 (part of the Civil War), the Union forces wrested Memphis from the Confederates. Yellow fever epidemics that started in the 1870s decimated the population. In 1897, Memphis' uniquely shaped pavilion was a significant part of the Tennessee Centennial exhibitions. The city was the hub of civil rights issues throughout the 1960s, significantly as the place of the sanitation workers' strike. Also, it was in Memphis that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Memphis has a humid continental climate, with four clearly different seasons. The summers are hot and the winters are cold. Spring and autumn can be erratic and prone to harsh weather, identified with thunderstorms and strong gusts of wind. Summers can be very humid due to the city's proximity to the Gulf of Mexico; the temperature, though, is bearable. Winters are a stark contrast, and are liable to be freezing cold. There is an abundance of rain to sustain the greenery of the city. For more than 60 percent of the year, the sun makes its presence felt in Memphis. |
