Memphis, TN
Opened 1929. FedEx's SuperHub since 1973 — the operation runs around the clock with more than 300 daily aircraft movements, most of them in a narrow overnight window known as the "sort." World's busiest cargo airport for most years from 1992 to 2009; Hong Kong now competes for the title.
After the White House, Graceland is the most-visited private home in America. Elvis Presley bought the Colonial Revival mansion on a 14-acre estate in 1957, at 22, for about $100,000, and lived there until he died in 1977 — he is buried in the Meditation Garden beside the pool, alongside his parents and grandmother. The house is a perfect time capsule of mid-century excess: the Jungle Room with its green shag carpet on the ceiling and Polynesian furniture, the yellow-and-blue TV room with three sets built into the wall (a habit he picked up from LBJ), the racquetball building, his cars and two airplanes including the Convair 880 "Lisa Marie." A modern entertainment complex across the street holds the rest of the collection.
On April 3, 1968, an Eastern Air Lines flight from Atlanta to Memphis was delayed before takeoff while the aircraft was searched for a bomb. The threat was specific — directed at one passenger on the manifest, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The plane was eventually cleared. Dr. King flew in to Memphis to lead a march supporting the Memphis sanitation strike. That night at Mason Temple he gave the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech. The next evening, at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, he was shot on the second-floor balcony of Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel. The Lorraine Motel is still there, at 450 Mulberry Street in the South Main Arts District of downtown Memphis. The balcony is preserved exactly as it was. The room is preserved exactly as it was. A simple wreath marks the spot where Dr. King fell. Two 1960s cars sit in their original parking spots below the balcony — a 1968 Cadillac and a 1959 Dodge that were there that evening. Around the motel, a full museum complex has been built: the National Civil Rights Museum, opened in 1991 and substantially expanded since. The main exhibit traces the entire American civil rights story from the slave trade through the 1968 strike and beyond — 260 artifacts, 40 films, the Rosa Parks bus, a Greyhound Freedom Riders bus, a Memphis sanitation truck, an authentic 1960s lunch counter. Across Mulberry Street is the rooming house from which James Earl Ray fired the shot; that building is part of the complex too, with the bathroom window preserved and the actual rifle on display. The museum is one of only five U.S. sites accredited as an International Site of Conscience. A reimagined Legacy Experience exhibit opens May 16, 2026, marking the museum's 35th anniversary — five new galleries on poverty, education, housing, gender equity, and nonviolence, tracing the civil rights movement from 1968 to the present.
A two-room shotgun shack in East Tupelo, built by Vernon Presley in 1934 with $180 borrowed from his employer. Elvis Aaron Presley was born here January 8, 1935 — his identical twin Jessie Garon was stillborn. The Presley family lost the house to the bank when Elvis was two; they moved around Mississippi for the next eleven years before leaving for Memphis in 1948. The house was bought by the city of Tupelo in 1957 with proceeds from a benefit concert Elvis performed for the local youth. The 15-acre Elvis Presley Park surrounding the house includes the original Assembly of God church where Elvis was first exposed to gospel music (moved here from its original site), an "Elvis at 13" bronze statue, and a museum tracing his early years in the Shake Rag community. More than 100,000 visitors a year. Designated a Mississippi historic landmark; part of the official Mississippi Blues Trail.
Stuttgart sits at the center of the Grand Prairie of Arkansas — a perfectly flat, naturally treeless plain that became the most productive rice-growing region in the United States after the first commercial rice crop was planted here in 1904. Today Arkansas produces roughly half of all U.S. rice; Stuttgart is the largest rice-handling town in the country. The same flooded fields that produce the rice also lie directly under the Mississippi Flyway — the migration corridor for an estimated 40% of all North American waterfowl. The result: Stuttgart hosts the World's Championship Duck Calling Contest every Thanksgiving weekend (since 1936), a four-day festival that brings 50,000+ visitors and judges the country's best duck callers on a four-call sequence (hail, feed, mating, comeback). Riceland Foods is headquartered here. The Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie tells both the agricultural and the waterfowl stories. November–January is duck season; outside hunting season Stuttgart's flat-as-a-table terrain is itself the landscape attraction.