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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: March 2011
Without question, Sarah Anne Ellis Dorsey was one of the most intellectually gifted women of Mississippi. With considerable aplomb, she dealt as best she could with the emotional tensions arising from her lifelong compulsion to balance the conventional female role of the plantation South wi
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: 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 2003
In the 1600s, Colonial French settlers brought Christianity into the lands that are now the state of Mississippi. Throughout the period of French rule and the period of Spanish dominion that followed, Roman Catholicism was the principal religion.
Published: August 2001
“When nobody else is moving and the students are moving, they are the leadership for everybody.”
Ed King
Mississippi Civil Rights worker 1963
Published: January 2005
Rosalie mansion, which sits high on a Mississippi River bluff in Natchez, Mississippi, is one of the city’s most historic homes.
Published: December 2023
A Gloomy Day in Newport
“It’s a gloomy day at Newport, It’s a gloomy, gloomy day.
It’s a gloomy day at Newport, My music’s going away.
What’s gonna happen to my music? What’s gonna happen to my song?”
OVERVIEW
1927—what a year! Charles Lindbergh flew to Paris, Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs, and the first talking movie was released. Perhaps of even more significance to citizens who lived along the Mississippi River, the U.S.
Published: October 2000
From the time Mississippi joined the Union in 1817 until the end of World War II, the Democrats won the state's presidential electoral votes in every election except two.
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: September 2002
In the late 1800s and early 1900s many homes in Mississippi and other rural American states did not have indoor plumbing and had inadequate sanitary facilities. Families could rarely afford to install indoor plumbing.
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.
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: March 2023
Growing Up in Kosciusko
OVERVIEW
In many classrooms, a study of the Civil War will emphasize battles, war strategies, and outcomes. While indispensable to an understanding of this significant event in American history, these facts alone provide little insight into what life was actually like for the soldier.
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: August 2005
In 1836, the northeastern region of Mexico known as Tejas revolted, fought for its independence, and became The Republic of Texas.
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: May 2000
During its first half century as a territory and state (1810-1860), Mississippi was an agrarian-frontier society. Its population was made up of four groups: Native Americans, White people, enslaved people, and free Black people.
Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War
Camp Near Gadsden, Ala
October 21, 1864
My Dear Sister
Published: April 2009
“We Stood firm to the union when secession Swept as an avalanche over the state. For this cause alone we have been treated as savages instead of freeman by the rebel authorities.”
Newton Knight, Petition to Governor William Sharkey, July 15, 1865
Published: January 2004
When Paul B. Johnson, Jr. was inaugurated as Mississippi’s fifty-fourth governor on January 21, 1964, he became the only son of a Mississippi governor to follow his father to the state’s highest office.
Published: April 2010
The members of the Mississippi Legislature excitedly listened to Governor John J.