The Promise Land community, a small village west of Nashville, Tennessee was founded after the Civil War by people who had been enslaved at the Cumberland Iron Furnace. These early settlers, who included United States Colored Troops veterans, were able to purchase land and establish Black‑owned businesses. This afforded the community a level of stability that defies conventional wisdom about the post‑Reconstruction‑era South.In time the community encompassed approximately 1,000 acr...

Before there were guidebooks, there were just guides—people in the community you could count on to show you around.I'll Take You There is written by and with the people who most intimately know Nashville, foregrounding the struggles and achievements of people's movements toward social justice. The colloquial use of "I'll take you there" has long been a response to the call of a stranger: for recommendations of safe passage through unfamiliar territory, a decent meal and pl...

In the harsh winter of 1779, as the leader of a flotilla of settlers, John Donelson loaded his family and thirty slaves into a forty-foot flatboat at the present site of Kingsport, Tennessee. Their journey into the wilderness led to the founding of a settlement now known as Nashville—over one thousand river miles away. In the fall of 2016, photographer John Guider retraced the Donelson party’s journey in his hand-built 14½' motorless rowing sailboat while making a visual documentation of t...