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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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
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: 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: March 2009
The scenic Natchez Trace Parkway, a unit of the National Park Service since 1938, extends from the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, south to Natchez, Mississippi. The Parkway, according to promotional literature, “commemorates” or “memorializes” the historic Natchez Trace, a road that con
Published: March 2023
Growing Up in Kosciusko
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.
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 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: April 2011
In 1949, political scientist V. O. Key suggested that “insofar as any geographical division remains within the politics of [Mississippi] it falls along the line that separates the delta and the hills.” By the time Key thus defined the state’s political line of demarcation, James O.
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: October 2008
“Richmond and Corinth are now the great strategical points of war, and our success at these points should be insured at all hazards,” declared a Union general early in the American Civil War.
Published: October 2006
William Faulkner, Mississippi’s most famous novelist, once said, “To understand the world, you have to understand a place like Mississippi.”
Published: August 2000
Constitutions embody the basic laws and organizations of governments. Constitutions may be written or accepted by tradition. For example, the Constitution of the United States is a written document that spells out the organization and powers of the federal government.
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.