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Published: February 2025
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, it was poorly prepared for the challenges ahead. The American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) consisted of a measly 127,151 soldiers, a minuscule military compared to Britain's four million and France’s eight million.
Return to About the Mississippi Constitution of 1890
Published: September 2001
Mississippi, like most of America, responded with unbridled patriotism when the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 thrust the nation into World War II. Thousands of Mississippians entered the armed forces. In every community, citizens on the home front contributed to the war effort.
Published: June 2010
Major General Fox Conner, inducted into the Mississippi Hall of Fame in 1987, never achieved fame outside his chosen profession. He lived quietly and unobtrusively, he never sought publicity, and he died in relative obscurity.
Published: August 2000
The six southern states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Florida met February 4, 1861, in convention at Montgomery, Alabama, and established the Confederate States of America.
Published: May 2004
In 1929 the mayor of Columbia, Mississippi, Hugh Lawson White, gazed out his office window and contemplated the town’s future.
Published: August 2006
The ferocity of Hurricane Katrina etched the date August 29, 2005, in the minds of everyone who experienced it. South Mississippians, and the thousands of people from across the country who came to their aid, are forever shaped by the disaster and its aftermath.
Published: September 2004
Gideon Lincecum moved to Mississippi in 1818. He brought his family, which included his wife Sarah Bryan, two small children, his parents, some siblings, and a few enslaved African-Americans.
Return to When Youth Protest: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1970
Margaret Walk
Published: April 2007
General William Tecumseh Sherman is probably best remembered for his spectacular 1864 “March to the Sea” in which he stormed 225 miles through Georgia with no line of communication in a Union campaign to take the American Civil War to the Confederate population.
Return to About the Mississippi Constitution of 1817
Constitution and Form of Government for the State of Mississippi
Published: April 2006
Farm-raised catfish is the largest aquaculture industry in the United States. In 2005, the U.S. catfish industry produced 600 million pounds of catfish from 165,000 pond water acres.
Published: November 2004
By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.
Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War
Galena [Ill.] Advertiser
Published: November 2025
Jesse Leroy Brown, the third son of John “Papa” Brown, came of age during the Jim Crow Era. Racism clung to Jesse’s childhood experiences like the oppressive humidity of a Mississippi summer afternoon. Despite many obstacles, Brown eventually attended Ohio State University.
Published: August 2005
When Mississippi faced tough economic and social problems after the Great Depression and World War II, Owen Cooper challenged Mississippians to band together and successfully solve them.
Published: August 2004
Italian families have been found in cities and small towns throughout Mississippi since the 19th century. Their story of coming to America shows the obstacles that immigrants to Mississippi faced in assimilating to the broader society and their achievements along the way.
Published: October 2008
“Richmond and Corinth are now the great strategical points of war, and our success at these points should be insured at all hazards,” declared a Union general early in the American Civil War.
Published: August 2024
Founded in 1902 by Wallace Battle, the Okolona Industrial School offered industrial and teacher training for generations of Black men and women in northeastern Mississippi.
Published: September 2002
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was created in March 1956 by an act of the Mississippi Legislature. It came in the wake of the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka public school desegregation ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court.
Published: December 2003
When the constitutional convention met in July of 1817 to draft Mississippi’s first constitution, David Holmes was named president of the convention and was subsequently elected without opposition as the state’s first governor.
Published: January 2007
1935: Elvis is born
Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, on January 8, 1935, in a two-room shotgun house in East Tupelo, then a separate municipality that some called the “roughest town in north Mississippi.” Though poor, Elvis’s parents, Gladys and Vernon Presley, were
Published: November 2002
A small group of Chinese immigrants came to Mississippi after the American Civil War. In their new environment, they sought ways to earn money and to adapt to the predominant culture of the state while preserving their ethnic identity.