Search
Published: January 2004
Hugh Lawson White was perhaps the wealthiest man to hold the office of governor in Mississippi’s history, certainly in modern times. An industrialist and lumberman, White served two nonconsecutive terms and was among the oldest men elected governor.
Published: December 2003
Hiram Runnels lost the office of governor and won the office of governor by the narrowest margins in Mississippi’s history. In 1831 he lost by 247 votes and in 1833 he won by 558 votes, but then lost again in 1835 by 426 votes.
Published: August 2004
Governor Earl Brewer’s inauguration was an unusually festive occasion and attracted the largest crowd in the state's history up to that time. Railroad companies offered reduced rates and thousands of people came to Jackson from all over the state.
Published: January 2004
Governor Andrew Longino was a pivotal figure in Mississippi history. He was the first governor elected after the American Civil War who was not a Confederate veteran, and he was the last governor to be nominated by a state party convention.
Published: September 2011
In 1936, Time magazine suggested that “better than any living man, Senator Byron Patton Harrison of Mississippi represents in his spindle-legged, round-shouldered, freckle-faced person the modern history of the Democratic Party.” By then Harrison had been in politics since 1906 and n
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
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: December 2003
When Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys was removed from office June 15, 1868, President Andrew Johnson appointed Adelbert Ames provisional governor of Mississippi.
Published: July 2022
In 2022, more than fifty African Americans were serving in the Mississippi State Legislature, carrying on the legacy of the first Black men who served there in 1870. Mississippi’s first Black legislators were farmers and lawyers, barbers and blacksmiths, teachers and ministers.
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: January 2004
Shortly before Governor Edmond F. Noel’s inauguration on January 21, 1908, several Jackson businessmen recommended the sale of the Governor’s Mansion and the commercial development of the city block which the 1842 mansion occupied.
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.
OVERVIEW
In this lesson, students will explore the life and work of “the most popular and influential blues guitarist of the last three decades,” according to Robert Palmer, author of Deep Blues, (p. 178). The life of Riley B.
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: December 2003
William McWillie migrated to Mississippi from South Carolina, but, unlike most other antebellum Mississippians who migrated to the state, he did not come during his early childhood. McWillie moved to Mississippi during his middle years after a successful banking career in Camden, South Carolina.
Published: January 2004
During his 1931 and 1935 races for governor, Paul Burney Johnson Sr. called himself the “Champion of the Runt Pig People,” and in his successful campaign of 1939, he promised to inaugurate several New Deal measures in the state of Mississippi.
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: 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: 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: December 2003
When Colonel Ridgley C. Powers was discharged from the United States Army in December 1865, he decided to remain in Mississippi rather than return to his native state of Ohio. He purchased some land in Noxubee County near Shuqualak and soon became a successful planter.
Published: March 2008
In May 1964 Hazel Brannon Smith, editor and publisher of the Lexington Advertiser, won a Pulitzer Prize for “steadfast adherence to her editorial duties in the face of great pressure and opposition” from the Holmes County Citizens’ Council, which had formed in 1954, and from its segr
OVERVIEW
As the United States entered World War I in 1917, the nation stood divided on the country’s entry. Even within our own state, public opinion was divided. As political turmoil brewed in the state over the U.S.
OVERVIEW
On April 27, 1865, the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank some seven miles north of Memphis, Tennessee.
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).
OverviewOkolona Industrial School was founded by Wallace Aaron Battle in 1902, citing the size of Mississippi’s Black population and the high rate of illiteracy as the catalysts for his decision.