Beside Bicentennial Mall, the Tennessee State Museum moved into this purpose-built facility in 2018 after decades in an older downtown location. The museum holds one of the most significant collections of Tennessee history in the country — artifacts, documents, and objects that span from the prehistoric Indigenous cultures of the Cumberland River Valley through the present day. Among its major collections are materials related to the Civil War, the Reconstruction period, and the long history of African-American life in Tennessee, including documentation of the Nashville sit-in movement of 1960 that made the city a landmark of the Civil Rights Movement.
Tennessee's history is, in many ways, a compressed version of American history: frontier expansion and the violent displacement of the Cherokee; plantation agriculture and slavery; Civil War division; the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras; the Great Migration; the music industry. The museum attempts to hold all of that complexity honestly, and its permanent galleries are among the most carefully organized and intellectually serious state history exhibitions in the South. If you have time, the Civil War and Civil Rights galleries in particular are worth extended attention.