Nashville has been known beyond its borders for a number of things down through the generations. In the last two decades of the 18th century, it was a rising frontier outpost on the way to the West. It rode on Andrew Jackson's coattails when that redoubtable hometown boy was the nation's top war hero and twice its president in the first half of the 19th century. A major battle of the Civil War was fought in the city, and after Tennessee and the other Southern states lost their war of rebellion against the Union, Nashville was an Upper South capital city that bounced back fast. By the 1890s, it was one of the leading urban areas in the region, thriving on a New South philosophy of commercial boosterism closely linked to Northern industry and capital.

In the 20th century, the capital city of Tennessee was known in various quarters and at various times as the Athens of the South (for its early striving to achieve a cultural transplant in the American wilderness), the Wall Street of the South (for its own developed capital resources), the Protestant Vatican (for its many churches and denominational headquarters) and of course Music City U.S.A. (for its eminence in country and other forms of popular music).

Twenty-two years ago, when the city celebrated its bicentennial, a team of local researchers, writers, editors, photographers, artists and designers was commissioned to put together a big coffee-table book of illustrations and narrative history to mark the occasion. Nashville: The Faces of Two Centuries was published in time for the 200th birthday party in 1979. Its total printing of approximately 12,000 copies sold out in a little over a year, and the book was not reissued.

Now comes a companion volume, similar in size and appearance, to pick up the story of this middle America city with a higher profile than its modest size (a half-million plus) would suggest. Nashville: An American Self-Portrait is not so much history as current events, with the specific focus being notable events and personalities of the year 2000.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, and disarmingly simple: set up a framework of 12 chapters, roughly corresponding to the months of the year, and ask an equal number of experienced journalists to write topical essays for each month. As it turned out, that was only the beginning. Luckily, the year was filled with momentous events in the life of the city and the nation. But beyond that, the editors picked up 22 sidebar writers, more than two dozen photographers who collectively produced the book's 300-plus pictures, three local artists who contributed original works and a breaking news ribbon of trenchant stories from each day of the year.

Altogether, they add up to a large format, 384-page book full of four-color art and a cacophony of voices an engaging and provocative full-dress review of modern Nashville at the turn of the new century.

Playing to the strength of the city's reputation in the trade as a good book town, the editors went for an all-Nashville cast of writers, editors, artists, photographers, designers, production specialists, marketers and distributors. Even the name writers such as David Halberstam and Roy Blount Jr. lived in the city previously, as students or as young reporters. And Hal Crowther, a New Yorker transplanted to North Carolina, qualifies by virtue of his marriage to novelist Lee Smith, who taught school in Nashville in the 1960s. Crowther's sidebar describing Smith's luncheon meeting with Dolly Parton, another one-time Nashvillian gone big-time, at a local plantation restaurant is worth the price of the book all by itself [see excerpt].

So are two chapters on politics: Capitol Offenses, a telling comparison of state and local governments by Larry Daughtrey, veteran political writer for The Tennessean, Nashville's daily paper; and Favorite Sons, a candid assessment of Vice President (and former Tennessean reporter) Al Gore's failed quest for the White House. Daughtrey chronicles the state General Assembly's painful inability to come to grips with tax reform and the local government's recovery from a philandering mayor's public embarrassment.

Local political writer Philip Ashford tracks the Gore fiasco from the Democrat's national headquarters in Nashville, where overconfidence led to the loss of Tennessee and with it, the electoral college votes that would have assured victory.

Once before, in 1824, another Nashvillian Andrew Jackson won the national popular vote but lost when the counting moved to Washington. After history's lightning bolt struck again in the same place 176 years later, Nashville artist Nancy Blackwelder was inspired to paint her own version of a famous Jackson portrait, with Gore's face replacing Jackson's.

Like the city itself, Nashville: An American Self-Portrait is full of such surprises.

John Egerton's previous books include Southern Food and Speak Now Against the Day.

Excerpt: Lee and Dolly do Belle Meade

In Nashville: An American Self-Portrait, essayist Hal Crowther describes what happens when his wife, the writer Lee Smith, meets Dolly Parton for lunch at an antebellum plantation in an upscale Nashville neighborhood.

When you say that my wife [Lee Smith] is a novelist and a professor of English, you haven't begun to paint her portrait. When you say that Dolly Parton is a legendary country singer, songwriter, entrepreneur, and Hollywood actress, you've only scratched the surface of the smartest woman who ever grew up in Sevier County, Tennessee.

What's relevant is that they're both shrewd mountain girls with old-fashioned manners, and watching them recognize each other was a privilege I'll remember. I know one well, the other just slightly and recently. But my take on this pair of sisters is that if Dolly Parton had also been sent to Hollins College, they'd be virtually the same person. It's not surprising that each claims to have been the other's fan forever.

"I've got a confession—I tried to dress down a little today because you're a famous writer and I didn't want to look too cheap," says Dolly, who's wearing a black skirt slit almost to the thigh, and a purple sequined body sweater you could substitute for your Christmas tree.

"I've got a confession, too," says Lee. "I put on a little extra makeup to meet you, so you wouldn't think I was mousy."

By the time we reach the restaurant at Belle Meade Mansion, they're talking about their daddies. When we walk in, Dolly draws a round of applause from the lunch crowd. . . . Two hard-breathing autograph vultures hit her before she gets to her table, and Dolly treats them like kin, like royalty. The waitress requests a laying-on of hands, and Dolly indulges her, too.

"They love for me to touch them," she says, without condescension, and we contemplate the demands of serious A-list celebrity. At 54, this is a woman who seems to love her work, her fans, and the considerable responsibility of being Dolly Parton. Her fans are polite but hungry to make a connection, any connection, and the lady isn't stingy with herself. She doesn't know it, but there isn't one famous writer in the world who gets spontaneous ovations at lunch.

—Hal Crowther

I arrived in Baghdad on April 10, 2003, the day after a Marine tank felled the imposing statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdaus Square. At the time, I thought my 12-hour drive from Kuwait, in a sport utility vehicle that lacked armored plates, was the most dangerous thing I’d ever do. We passed rock-throwing bandits, American helicopter gunships strafing Republican Guard holdouts, and looters ransacking government buildings. We stopped in Baghdad’s southern outskirts to watch soldiers pursuing fedayeen armed with rocket-propelled grenades.

How wrong I was.

Over the next 18 months, as Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post, I encountered real danger. I was in a hotel that was struck by a suicide car bomber. I missed driving over a pulverizing roadside bomb by seconds. And I spent two weeks embedded with Marines in Fallujah, taking incoming fire as they sought to clear the city of hard-core insurgents.

When I needed a respite, I went into the Green Zone, the seven-square-mile American enclave in central Baghdad surrounded by concrete walls and razor wire. There I could eat pork bacon for breakfast. I could chill out in a bar. I could buy Doritos and Dr Pepper from the PX. The Green Zone was a perfect rest-and-recreation spot. There were pools, gyms and Chinese restaurants. The problem was that for most Americans in Baghdad save for journalists like myself it wasn’t just for relaxing. It was where they lived and worked and spent almost all of their time.

From inside the Green Zone, the real Baghdad the checkpoints, the bombed-out buildings, the paralyzing traffic jams could have been a world away. The horns, the gunshots, the muezzin’s call to prayer, never drifted over the walls. The fear on the faces of American troops was rarely seen by the denizens of the palace. The acrid smoke of a detonated car bomb didn’t fill the air. The sub-Saharan privation and Wild West lawlessness that gripped one of the world’s most ancient cities swirled around the walls, but on the inside, the calm sterility of an American subdivision prevailed.

The disconnect between life in this bubble and life in the rest of Iraq is a key theme of my book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. The book tells the story of the people and ideas that inhabited the Green Zone dur- ing the occupation, from Viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to the fleet of 20-somethings hired to implement the idea that Americans could build a Jeffersonian democracy in an embattled Middle Eastern country. I describe how Bremer ignored what Iraqis told him they wanted, or needed, and instead pursued irrelevant neoconservative solutions: a flat tax, a sell-off of Iraqi government assets and an end to food rations. I detail how his underlings spent their days drawing up pie-in-the-sky policies, among them a new traffic code and a law protecting microchip designs, instead of rebuilding looted buildings and restoring electricity production. These almost-comic initiatives angered Iraqis and helped fuel the insurgency.

Reporting the book in the Green Zone was the easy part. Waving my American passport and submitting to three separate pat-downs was all it took to get inside. Of course, I did encounter plenty of people who didn’t want to talk to me, or refused to speak candidly, but my travails in the Emerald City were nothing compared to life outside.

In the first few months after Baghdad’s liberation, the house I rented had just two guards, each working 12-hour shifts. As the security situation deteriorated, I hired more guards and bought them more powerful weapons. We reinforced our walls with sandbags and barbed wire. By early 2004, I joked that I had a small militia working for me. We didn’t know it at the time, but our fortifications were noticed by the bad guys, who found new ways to target us. One morning, they bombed the home of a Post translator. He and his family survived, and we relocated them outside Iraq, but it sent us an unambiguous message: We were in the insurgents’ sights.

As roadside bombings became more prevalent, The Post bought the bureau two $90,000 armored Jeep Cherokees. But when they arrived, I realized we had a problem: The shiny silver paint was too conspicuous. The SUVs looked like they belonged to foreign contractors. It was as if they had a big bull’s-eye on them. Risking the wrath of my bosses, I sent the vehicles to Baghdad’s Sadr City slum. Sixty dollars later, the shiny paint was sandblasted off and taxi decals were affixed to the sides. It was urban camouflage.

The trick worked for a while, but when contractors started doing the same thing, I gave up on the armored vehicles and got back in a soft-skinned sedan. As the months passed, the danger mounted. In late 2003, I was in the Baghdad Hotel when it was car bombed. Had the window behind me not been covered with Mylar film, I almost certainly would have been diced with glass shards. A few weeks later, on a drive outside Baghdad, I passed what I thought was a traffic accident. Two cars were on fire. Dozens of people were milling in the road. As I drove by, the mob appeared to be celebrating. When I returned to Baghdad, I learned why: The burned corpses I saw on the road were those of seven Spanish intelligence agents who had been ambushed moments earlier.

I eventually came to conclude that Iraq did not have to turn out the way it has. The Americans who were assigned to govern and reconstruct Iraq in the crucial first months after liberation should have focused on pragmatic policies getting people back to work, improving security and rebuilding the shattered infrastructure instead of the pie-in-the-sky initiatives that I detail in Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

Would that have made a difference? We’ll never know for sure, but doing a better job of governance and reconstruction almost certainly would have kept many Iraqis from taking up arms against their new leaders and the Americans. There still would have been an insurgency, led by zealots who saw no room for compromise, but perhaps it would have been smaller and more containable.

If this place succeeds, an American friend who worked for the occupation administration told me, it will be in spite of what we did, not because of it. Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, where he was Baghdad bureau chief from April 2003 to September 2004. His website is www.rajivc.com.

<b>Grandmother’s gift inspires a lifelong fascination</b> It was my grandmother who first got me interested in assassination. I was born on Lincoln’s birthday, February 12. When I was a child, from as far back as I can remember, I received Lincoln books, trinkets, medals and souvenirs as gifts. When I was 10 years old, I discovered the dark side of the Lincoln story. That’s when my grandmother Elizabeth, a veteran of the long-vanished, legendary Chicago tabloid newspaper scene, gave me what some might consider an odd gift for a child a framed engraving of John Wilkes Booth’s Deringer pistol, the one he used to murder Abraham Lincoln. Framed with this engraving was a clipping from the Chicago Tribune dated April 15, 1865, the day Lincoln died.

Unfortunately the clipping was incomplete, so when I was a child, I could read only part of the story. The article described the pistol attack on the president, Booth’s leap to the stage at Ford’s Theatre, the vicious knifing of Secretary of State Seward, and Booth’s escape across the stage and race to the back door leading out to the alley and then . . . nothing. Someone had cut off the rest of the story so the clipping would fit within the frame! I must have read that article hundreds of times over the next few years. I remember vividly one night when I read that clipping over and over and thought, I want to read the rest of the story. Little did I know that one day, I would write about that story in not one, but a series of books devoted to the end of the Civil War, Lincoln’s last days and his assassination and its unforgettable impact on American history and myth. And so it was my grandmother’s gift a priceless relic that still hangs on my wall that triggered my lifelong obsession with the Lincoln assassination and inspired me to write Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer and Lincoln’s Assassins: Their Trial and Execution. One of the most thrilling things I did as part of the research for my books was to acquire an entire run of rare, original issues of the Chicago Tribune about 100 newspapers from the end of the Civil War through the death of Lincoln and the trial of the conspirators. Whenever I look at them I am overcome with fond memories of my grandmother Elizabeth. When I grew older and learned more about Lincoln, I began collecting at a more advanced level books from the Civil War, newspapers, posters announcing the death of Lincoln, original prints and photographs and more. In high school, instead of buying a used car, I purchased one of the rare original reward posters offering a $100,000 reward for the Lincoln assassins. Once I got to college, I studied the assassination of Lincoln, and his era, ever more seriously. I was a student of John Hope Franklin at the University of Chicago and took his wonderful courses on the Civil War era and on the history of the American South. Manhunt and Lincoln’s Assassins are the result of a lifetime of study, plus several years of intensive research and writing. I’ve assembled a reference library of several thousand books, relics, documents and illustrations covering Abraham Lincoln, the presidency, the Civil War and 19th-century American history. Much of what I needed for Manhunt and Lincoln’s Assassins was already sitting on my shelves. I just needed to open these books and read them again. I also consulted my extensive collection of Civil War newspapers. Having so many priceless sources in my home library allowed me to work all day and then deep into the night my favorite time for research and writing. Public libraries close at night. My library was open 24 hours a day. These primary sources were absolutely essential. I could not have written the books without my collection of original materials.

I’ve tried to share many of these pieces in Lincoln’s Assassins, a book I consider the pictorial companion to Manhunt. Lincoln’s Assassins contains almost 300 color plates of the rare objects that have inspired my research, including the first publication ever of the entire series of Alexander Gardner’s notorious and haunting photographs of the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators. The book is a scrapbook that I hope will transport readers back to the saddest days in American history.

Of course, there are a number of wonderful relics that I haven’t discovered. Number one is Sergeant Boston Corbett’s pistol the one he used to shoot and kill John Wilkes Booth. It was a prize relic, even at the time. Collectors offered Corbett up to $1,000 for the pistol. He refused, but soon enough it was stolen from him, and it’s now been lost to history. The person who took it surely must have known its value, but I imagine that as it passed from hand to hand, and generation to generation, its history and importance have been lost. I’m betting that somewhere out there, a collector owns the revolver used to kill John Wilkes Booth and he doesn’t even know he has it. And then there are the Booth autopsy photos that vanished within days of his death.

For me, the manhunt for Booth and the trial and execution of his conspirators continues. I’m still researching the topic, and I’m still hoping to discover other relics, letters, documents, or photographs that have been lost for more than a century, and that I can use in my next book about the thrilling manhunt for Jefferson Davis and the astounding, nationwide funeral events for Abraham Lincoln. This is the most alluring thing about writing history. The story never really ends, and you never know what amazing thing you might discover tomorrow.

<i>James L. Swanson is a legal scholar with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Manhunt, his account of the search for John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators, spent 13 weeks on the</i> New York Times <i>bestseller list and has 250,000 copies in print. A movie version starring Harrison Ford is currently in pre-production.</i> Lincoln’s Assassins, <i>a book co-written in 2001 by Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg, is being brought back into print this fall in a new edition from William Morrow.</i>