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Published: May 2008
The service of African Americans with the Confederate army during the American Civil War has long intrigued historians and Civil War buffs. Were these men soldiers or servants? Did they get shot?
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.
Published: October 2009
It was late April 1865 and more than 2,000 tired, sick, and injured men, wearing dirty and tattered clothes, filed down the bluff from Vicksburg to a steamboat waiting at the docks on the Mississippi River.
Published: February 2008
“Southern blacks not only out-sang, out-marched, and out-prayed their oppressors, but they also out-thought them.”
Adam Fairclough, historian
Published: February 2011
Aaron Henry was born in 1922 in Coahoma County, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. From a young age, he worked in the cotton fields alongside his family on the Flowers Plantation outside of Clarksdale.
Published: August 2005
In 1836, the northeastern region of Mexico known as Tejas revolted, fought for its independence, and became The Republic of Texas.
Published: January 2012
Haley Barbour was elected governor on November 4, 2003, in the largest voter turnout in Mississippi history, up to that time.
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: 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: February 2022
In the early twentieth century, Black people in Mississippi who aimed to exercise their rights as citizens of the United States had few allies.
Published: October 2019
In May 1954, the United States Supreme Court announced in a unanimous decision that segregation—the practice of separating Black and White students, by law, within the public school system—was unconstitutional. That decision, Brown v.
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.
Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War
Johnson’s Island. Jan. 3rd 1863
[Should be 1864]
Published: January 2011
Every ten years the federal government takes a census; it counts everyone living in the United States and its territories. It has done this since 1790.
Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War
Fredericksburg, January 29, 1863
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.
Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War
Diary of Thomas E. Wilkins, Brooksville; 11th Mississippi Regiment.
Published: May 2006
“Over a century ago, prodded by the demands of four million men and women just emerging from slavery, Americans made their first attempt to live up to the noble professions of their political creed - something few societies have ever done.
Published: August 2008
Cool Papa Bell is considered to be the fastest man ever to play professional baseball. His achievements, in the Negro Leagues and in Latin America, earned his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1974.
Published: December 2003
Although his term began January 7, 1822, Governor Leake did not deliver his inaugural address until June 24 because the capital city was being relocated from Natchez. When he finally gave his address, the capital was temporarily situated at Columbia in Marion County.
Published: December 2003
Governor John Jones Pettus has the distinction of serving the shortest term of governor in the state’s history. He served for five days between the resignation of Henry Foote on January 5 and the inauguration of his successor, John J. McRae, on January 10, 1854.
Published: December 2003
After Governor John Isaac Guion vacated the office of governor November 4, 1851, Mississippi was without a chief executive for twenty days.
Published: January 2014
While serving as attorney general of the state of Mississippi in the early 1980s, Bill Allain filed a suit asking the Mississippi Supreme Court to separate the functions of the executive and legislative branches of state government, especially in the budgetary process.
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