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Published: January 2004
Following eight years in the Mississippi Senate, from 1988 to 1996, and a four-year term as lieutenant governor, Ronnie Musgrove was elected governor under circumstances unique in Mississippi history.
Published: January 2004
In 1903, the people of Mississippi nominated the candidates for all public offices, from the governor down to the local constable, in a popular primary election. The first governor elected under Mississippi’s new primary law was James K.
Published: December 2003
Governor Joseph W. Matthews was a plain and unlettered frontiersman who lacked the flair for oratory which Mississippians expected from their statesmen. During the 1847 governor’s race, Matthews, a Democrat and surveyor by trade, was jeered by the aristocratic Whigs.
Published: December 2003
Anselm McLaurin, the oldest of eight brothers and the father of ten children, was the last Confederate veteran to be elected governor of Mississippi. At the age of sixteen, he enlisted in the Third Mississippi Artillery and became well-known for his daring and bravery during the Civil War.
Published: January 2004
For all of William Winter’s many contributions to the state of Mississippi, he will best be remembered for the Education Reform Act of 1982. After the legislature failed to enact his educational reforms during the regular session in 1982, Governor Winter called a special session.
Published: December 2003
Governor Tilghman Tucker and his wife, Sarah F. McBee, were the first residents of the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion and because of the formal opening of the mansion, his inauguration on January 10, 1842, was especially festive. But Governor Tucker was a plain man of simple tastes.
Published: December 2003
John Anthony Quitman was born in New York on September 1, 1798. He migrated to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1821 by way of Ohio, where he had studied law and taught school.
Published: December 2003
James L. Alcorn was Mississippi’s first elected Republican governor. Alcorn had previously served in the state legislature of Kentucky and Mississippi, and had risen to the rank of general in the Confederate military service during the Civil War.
Published: December 2003
For five years after the Civil War, both martial law and civil authority existed concurrently in Mississippi. That phenomenon created a constitutional entanglement that scholars have yet to unravel.
Published: January 2004
During the depths of the worst depression in American history, Martin S. Conner was inaugurated governor of Mississippi on January 19, 1932. “We assume our duties,” he said, “when men are shaken with doubt and with fear, and many are wondering if our very civilization is about to crumble.”
Published: December 2003
Gerard C. Brandon was the first native Mississippian to be elected governor. He also held the office longer than any other governor before the American Civil War.
Published: January 2004
Although Henry Lewis Whitfield served in the state’s highest office, he is perhaps best known for his career in public education and his many contributions to the development of Mississippi’s public school system.
Published: December 2003
A contemporary historian wrote that the history of George Poindexter’s public career is “the history of the Territory and the State of Mississippi, so closely and prominently was he connected with everything that occurred.”
Published: December 2003
Known to his friends and followers as “Johnny McRae of Chickasawhay,” Governor John J. McRae sailed his steamer Triumph up and down the Chickasawhay River “as if it were the Mississippi itself.” McRae was a folk hero and was extremely popular with the people of Mississippi.
Published: January 2004
Although he was only five-feet, two-inches tall, Theodore G. Bilbo, in life as in legend, is a towering figure who stalked across the pages of Mississippi history.
Return to Mississippi Soldiers in the Civil War
Galena [Ill.] Advertiser
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: 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: February 2005
The WPA Slave Narratives are interviews with formerly enslaved people conducted from 1936 through 1938 by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), a unit of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
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.
Explore important Black legislators and events during the Reconstruction period. , Use prior knowledge of the Civil War and its outcomes., Analyze the article’s terminology through discussion and individual research., Synthesize information to answer the questions.
Published: March 2006
The Great Flood of 1927 unleashed a spring season of catastrophic events along the banks of the Mississippi River. A weather system that stalled over the Midwestern states in the fall of 1926 brought untold amounts of water to the Upper Mississippi River region.
Published: July 2002
On the sweltering afternoon of July 7, 1962, the town of Oxford, Mississippi, paused to pay its final respects to its most famous native son.
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.