Nashville has a joyful way to celebrate America’s 250th birthday: Tennessee Voices, American Stories at the Tennessee State Museum. The free exhibition, which opened on January 13, 2026, gathers remarkable artifacts and personal stories of Tennesseans who helped shape both their state and the nation.
The show is organized around three ideas from the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the People,” “A More Perfect Union” and “The Blessings of Liberty.” Moving through those themes, visitors meet soldiers, artists, inventors, entrepreneurs and community leaders from the 1760s to today, some famous and others happily discovered for the first time.
Highlights include a sword presented by North Carolina to John Sevier, Tennessee’s first governor, honoring Patriot officers at the Battle of Kings Mountain; one of the earliest known dated Tennessee quilts, made by Rebecah Foster in 1808 with an American eagle and seventeen stars; artifacts from Adolpho A. Birch, the trailblazing jurist who served at every level of the state judiciary; and a performance costume worn by Dolly Parton, whose philanthropy is part of her Tennessee story.
The museum, at 1000 Rosa L. Parks Boulevard by Bicentennial Capitol Mall, is free and open to everyone, with related programs planned through 2026. It is a warm invitation to ask, as the curators do: how will you make history?
Photo: Tennessee State Museum via Wikimedia Commons
