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About Memphis

Memphis is the county seat of Shelby County in extreme southern Tennessee, United States. It is located on the Chickasaw bluffs above the Mississippi River, where Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee meet. Memphis is the most populous city in Tennessee and the hub of the state’s second biggest metropolitan region. Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, Lakeland, and Millington in Tennessee, and Horn Lake, Olive Branch, and Southaven in Mississippi, are among Memphis‘ principal suburbs. 295 square miles in size (764 square km). (2000) city population of 690,743; Memphis MSA population of 1,205,204; (2010) city population of 646,889; Memphis MSA population of 1,316,100.

History

Hernando de Soto, a Spanish adventurer, visited the region in 1541. There were short French (1739) and Spanish (1795) forts on the location before the United States erected Fort Adams there in 1797. Memphis was founded in 1819 on territory that had previously been occupied by Chickasaw Indians. Andrew Jackson, subsequently President of the United States, was one of its founders. Memphis was named after the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis (which means “Place of Good Abode”).

Memphis flourished swiftly because to the rise of cotton farming in the South and its railroad and river transportation connections. It was founded in 1826. It was a Confederate military center early in the American Civil War, but it was overrun by a Union naval force on June 6, 1862, and occupied until the war’s end. In May 1866, one of the country’s bloodiest racial riots occurred there.

Memphis thereafter became a center of cotton commerce in the South. Yellow fever ravaged the city in the 1870s, killing over 5,000 people. The city got insolvent, its population dwindled, and it relinquished its charter in 1879. Drastic sanitary measures, ongoing cotton commerce, and the development of a hardwood market all helped the city’s economic revival, and a new city charter was obtained in 1893. Following World War II, economic development intensified. The civil rights movement had a significant impact on the city throughout the 1960s. On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel by a sniper’s bullet while visiting the city in support of a sanitation workers’ strike. In 1991, the hotel was transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum, with displays tracing the history of the civil rights fight and King’s room maintained.

Information About Memphis

Memphis, a city on the Mississippi River in southwest Tennessee, is well-known for giving rise to the important blues, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll genres. At the storied Sun Studio, where albums by Johnny Cash, B.B. King, and Elvis Presley were recorded, Presley’s Graceland residence is a well-liked tourist destination. The Rock ‘n Soul Museum, Blues Hall of Fame, and Stax Museum of American Soul Music are further musical icons.

Population: 650,910 (2020)
Area code: Area code 901
Mayor: Jim Strickland
Clubs and Teams: Memphis Grizzlies, Memphis 901 FC, MORE