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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: 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: February 2003
In the decades prior to the American Civil War, market places where enslaved Africans were bought and sold could be found in every town of any size in Mississippi. Natchez was unquestionably the state’s most active slave trading city, although substantial slave markets existed at Aberdeen,
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: May 2025
When Prince Abdul Rahman Ibrahima arrived in Natchez in 1788, he walked up a landing dock where he met Thomas Foster, a young farmer who would purchase him like cattle and keep him enslaved for forty years on a nearby plantation.
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: November 2010
The Charles W. Capps Jr. Archives and Museum, which sits on the campus of Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, is named, like a number of buildings at DSU, after a state political figure who needed to be thanked.
Published: September 2006
Between 1890 and 1927 the Grand Opera House in Meridian, Mississippi, provided east Mississippi and west Alabama with varied entertainment, ranging from operas in a variety of languages to theatrical entertainment and minstrel shows.
Published: November 2004
By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.
Published: February 2013
Inauspicious beginnings
On February 23, 1894, the Pascagoula Democrat-Star, in its “State News Boiled Down” section, listed news from across the state alerting readers to items like public resignations and appointments, legislative actions, warnings of floods, and new businesse
Published: March 2012
Mississippi University for Women, originally the Mississippi Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls, was the first taxpayer supported college for women in the United States.
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: 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: July 2015
The 1830s witnessed a succession of profound, and often wrenching, changes that remade Mississippi. At the start of the decade, White settlement was confined to the region between the Mississippi and Pearl Rivers and to another small pocket on the upper branches of the Tombigbee River.
Published: May 2002
George E. Ohr (1857-1918) has been called the first art potter in the United States, and many say the finest. Ohr was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, the son of young German immigrants, Johanna Wiedman and George Ohr.
Published: December 2006
Ruby Elzy was a sweet-voiced soprano from the hills of northeastern Mississippi who became a star of Broadway, radio, and the movies in the 1930s.
Published: June 2020
In November 1966, Noel Henry, wife of prominent Clarksdale NAACP leader Aaron Henry, sent her regrets to Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW).
Published: October 2008
In the late 1940s in Indianola, Mississippi, a young man named Riley King was singing and playing guitar with his friends in a group called the “Famous St.
Published: October 2007
The Natchez Indians were among the last American Indian groups to inhabit the area now known as southwestern Mississippi.
Return to Capitals and Capitols: The Places and Spaces of Mississippi's Seat of Government
Published: January 2009
United States Senator John Sharp Williams, of Yazoo County, Mississippi, launched his political career in 1892, when he defeated a Populist opponent in his congressional district and entered the United States House of Representatives the following year.
Published: October 2001
John Law Glossary
In the early 18th century the economy of France was depressed. The government was deeply in debt and taxes were high.
Published: December 2003
Robert Lowry occupied the office of governor for eight years and was Mississippi’s first governor to remain in office for two consecutive four-year terms. He was first elected in 1881 and re-elected in 1885.