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Ryman Auditorium opened in 1892 as the Union Gospel Tabernacle, a red-brick church hall in downtown Nashville. From 1943 to 1974 it was the home of the Grand Ole Opry radio show, and it remains a concert hall with 2,362 seats and church-pew seating. By day, visitors tour the auditorium, its stage and exhibits on its history.

The Tennessee State Capitol, on a hill above downtown Nashville, was designed by William Strickland and built between 1845 and 1859 by skilled artisans, prisoners and enslaved labourers. It houses the General Assembly and the governor's office. Strickland and President James K. Polk are buried on its grounds, and free guided tours show the restored chambers.

The Tennessee State Museum tells the history of Tennessee from its first peoples to the present. Its current building opened in 2018 at the foot of Capitol Hill, beside the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park. A walk-through Time Tunnel leads past artefacts, documents and objects, and there are changing galleries and a children's gallery.

The Frist Art Museum opened in 2001 in Nashville's former main post office, an Art Deco building of 1934 near Union Station. It has no permanent collection: its galleries show changing exhibitions of art from around the world and from many periods, and it has a hands-on art studio for families.

RCA Studio B on Music Row opened in 1957 and became the centre of the 'Nashville Sound', the polished country style shaped by Chet Atkins. Elvis Presley, Dolly Parton, the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison recorded here. The Country Music Hall of Fame runs guided tours of the studio, which still has its original recording room.

The Parthenon in Centennial Park is a full-scale replica of the temple in Athens, built for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897 and rebuilt in concrete in the 1920s and 1930s. It is Nashville's art museum, with a collection of American paintings and, in the main hall, a 13-metre recreation of the Athena Parthenos statue.

Travellers Rest is the 1799 home of John Overton, a judge and a founder of Memphis, about 10 km south of downtown Nashville. For decades the plantation was worked by enslaved people. The house museum shows the family rooms, exhibits on the 1864 Battle of Nashville and a grounds tour on the landscape of enslavement.

Belle Meade, about 11 km west of downtown Nashville, was a plantation and thoroughbred horse farm founded in 1807 and run by the Harding and Jackson families for nearly a century, worked by more than a hundred enslaved people. Tours show the 1853 Greek Revival mansion, the outbuildings and the history of those who lived there; the site also has a winery.

Cheekwood is a 22-hectare estate on the western edge of Nashville, built in the 1920s for the Cheek family, whose fortune came from Maxwell House coffee. Since 1960 its Georgian-style mansion has been an art museum and its grounds a botanical garden, with a Japanese garden, a sculpture trail and seasonal displays.

The Lotz House is an 1858 frame house in Franklin, about 30 km south of Nashville, built by the German immigrant woodworker Albert Lotz. It stood at the centre of the Battle of Franklin on 30 November 1864, which left thousands dead and wounded; the family sheltered in a neighbour's cellar. Guided tours show the house and Civil War artefacts.

Fort Mose Historic State Park, 3 km north of St. Augustine, marks Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, founded in 1738 as the first legally sanctioned free African settlement in what became the United States. Nothing of the original fort stands; a museum, a reconstructed earthwork, a trail and a boardwalk over the salt marsh tell its story.

The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, north of the old town, stands on the site of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés's 1565 landing and first settlement, and of the Timucua village of Seloy. The grounds hold the spring tied to the Ponce de León legend, excavation finds, a planetarium and reconstructed Timucua and mission buildings.

The Oldest Store Museum on San Marco Avenue recreates C. F. Hamblen's general store, which traded in St. Augustine from about 1908 to 1960. Its shelves hold more than 100,000 items from the period, from patent medicines and corsets to farm tools, a penny-farthing and a steam tractor.

The Old St. Johns County Jail on San Marco Avenue was built in 1891 in Romanesque Revival style, its appearance kept hotel-like at Henry Flagler's request, and held prisoners until 1953. Costumed guides lead tours through the cells, the sheriff's quarters and the gallows yard.

Mission Nombre de Dios marks the place where Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed in 1565 and the first Mass of the settlement was said. The grounds by the Matanzas River hold the small Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche, rebuilt in 1915, a stainless-steel cross 63 metres tall raised in 1966, a museum and a modern church.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! St. Augustine opened in 1950 as the first permanent Ripley's museum. It fills Castle Warden, a Moorish Revival mansion of 1887 on San Marco Avenue, with oddities, artefacts and records collected by Robert Ripley and his successors.

The Castillo de San Marcos is a Spanish masonry fort on Matanzas Bay, built of coquina stone between 1672 and 1695 to guard St. Augustine. It is the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States; visitors walk its bastions, gun deck and vaulted rooms, now run by the National Park Service.

The St. Augustine Pirate & Treasure Museum, opposite the Castillo de San Marcos, moved here from Key West in 2010. It shows original pirate artefacts, among them one of the few surviving Jolly Roger flags, Thomas Tew's treasure chest and gold from shipwrecks, with interactive rooms on life aboard a pirate ship.

The Colonial Quarter on St. George Street is a living-history site covering St. Augustine's Spanish and British colonial periods. Costumed interpreters demonstrate blacksmithing, musket firing and boat building among reconstructed houses, and a 10-metre wooden watchtower looks over the old town.

The St. Augustine Light on Anastasia Island was completed in 1874, a 50-metre brick tower painted in black and white spirals with a red lantern. Visitors climb its 219 steps to the gallery, and the 1876 keepers' house and grounds hold a maritime museum on the town's seafaring and shipwreck archaeology.