Montgomery Bell Academy (MBA) is a preparatory day school for boys in grades 7 through 12 in Nashville, Tennessee. The school is located in the Whitland Area Neighborhood.

Sam Davis was a Confederate soldier executed by Union forces in Pulaski, Tennessee, during the American Civil War. He is popularly known as the Boy Hero of the Confederacy, although he was 21 when he died. He became a celebrated instance of Confederate memorialization in the late 1890s and early 1900s, eulogized by Middle Tennesseeans for his valor and sacrifice. Davis' story was popularized by editor J. B. Killebrew and later by Sumner Archibald Cunningham. Due in part to the story's themes of piety and masculinity, Cunningham's portrayal of Davis fit into mythology of the "Lost Cause" in the postwar South.