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The history of Memphis, Tennessee and its area began thousands of years ago with succeeding cultures of indigenous peoples. In the first millennium, it was settled by the Mississippian Culture. The Chickasaw Indian tribe emerged about the 17th century, or migrated into the area. The earliest European exploration may have encountered remnants of the Mississippian culture by Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. Later French explorers led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle likely encountered the Chickasaw. The European-American city of Memphis was not founded until 1819; the city was named after the ancient capital of Egypt on the Nile River. It rapidly developed as a major trading center for cotton cultivated at the region's large plantations and dependent on the work of enslaved African Americans. In the 19th century, and especially 1878 and 1879, the city suffered severe yellow fever epidemics. In 1878 tens of thousands of residents fled and more than 5,000 died, with hundreds more dying in the next year's epidemic, causing the city to go bankrupt and give up its charter until 1893. In the early 20th century, cotton was still a major commodity crop; Memphis grew into the world's largest spot cotton market and the world's largest hardwood lumber market. During the 1960s the city was at the center of civil rights actions, with a major strike by city sanitation workers in 1968. Having come to the city to support the workers, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a lone sniper on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel. Many notable blues musicians grew up in and around the Memphis and northern Mississippi area. These included such musical greats as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf and Isaac Hayes. ==Early history== From about 10,000 BCE, Paleo-Indians and later Archaic-Indians lived as communities of hunter-gatherers in the area that covers the modern-day southern United States.〔 〕 Approximately 800 CE to 1600 CE, the Mississippi River Delta was populated by tribes of the Mississippian culture, a mound-building Native American people who had developed in the late Woodland Indian period.〔 The Tipton Phase people were a local expression of the Mississippian culture. They inhabited the region of modern-day Tipton, Lauderdale and Shelby counties during the time of first contact with Europeans, at the arrival of the de Soto Expedition. By the end of the Mississippian period, the land was claimed and populated by the Chickasaw tribe. The exact origins of the Chickasaw are uncertain.〔 〕 Noted historian Horatio Cushman indicates that the Chickasaw, along with the Choctaw, may have had origins in present-day Mexico and migrated north.〔 〕 When Europeans first encountered them, the Chickasaw were living in villages in what is now Mississippi, with a smaller number in the area of Savannah Town, South Carolina. Twentieth-century scholar Patricia Galloway says that the Chickasaw may have been migrants to the area from the west and may not have been descendants of the pre-historic Mississippian culture.〔 Their oral history supports this, indicating they moved along with the Choctaw from west of the Mississippi in pre-history. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Memphis, Tennessee」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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