Recipient of the 2018 Special Achievement Award from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and Recipient of a 2018 Heritage Award for Education from the Mississippi Heritage Trust The perfect book for every Mississippian who cares about the state, this is a mammoth collaboration in which thirty subject editors suggested topics, over seven hundred scholars wrote entries, and countless individuals made suggestions. The volume will appeal to anyone who wants to know more about Mississippi and the people who call it home. The book will be especially helpful to students, teachers, and scholars researching, writing about, or otherwise discovering the state, past and present. The volume contains entries on every county, every governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists, and activists. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, drama, education, the environment, ethnicity, fiction, folklife, foodways, geography, industry and industrial workers, law, medicine, music, myths and representations, Native Americans, nonfiction, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else. This book also includes many surprises readers can only find by browsing.

Your Heritage Will Still Remain details how Mississippians, black and white, constructed their social identity in the aftermath of the crises that transformed the state beginning with the sectional conflict and ending in the late nineteenth century. Michael J. Goleman focuses primarily on how Mississippians thought of their place: as Americans, as Confederates, or as both. In the midst of secession, white Mississippians held firm to an American identity and easily transformed it into a Confederate identity venerating their version of American heritage. After the war, black Mississippians tried to etch their place within the Union and as part of transformed American society. Yet they continually faced white supremacist hatred and backlash. During Reconstruction, radical transformations within the state forced all Mississippians to embrace, deny, or rethink their standing within the Union. Tracing the evolution of Mississippians' social identity from 1850 through the end of the century uncovers why white Mississippians felt the need to create the Lost Cause legend. With personal letters, diaries and journals, newspaper editorials, traveler's accounts, memoirs, reminiscences, and personal histories as its sources, Your Heritage Will Still Remain offers insights into the white creation of Mississippi's Lost Cause and into the battle for black social identity. It goes on to show how these cultural hallmarks continue to impact the state even now.

The second edition of Mississippi: A History features a series of revisions and updates to its comprehensive coverage of Mississippi state history from the time of the region’s first inhabitants into the 21st century. Represents the only available comprehensive textbook on Mississippi history specifically for use in college-level courses Features an engaging narrative mix of topical and chronological chapters Includes chapter objectives that may be used by professors and students Offers coverage of Mississippi’s major political, economic, social, and cultural developments Presents two entirely new chapters on important 21st-century developments in Mississippi Contains expanded coverage of slavery in Mississippi history Includes completely up-to-date chapter sources, selected bibliography, and subject index

A history of the paradoxical time when the state's technology advanced and race relations deteriorated

In Defying Disfranchisement, R. Volney Riser documents a number of lawsuits challenging various requirements---including literacy tests, poll taxes, and white primaries---designed primarily to strip African American men of their right to vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Twelve of these wended their way to the U. S. Supreme Court, and that body coldly ignored the systematic disfranchisement of black southerners. Nevertheless, as Riser demonstrates, the attempts themselves were stunning and demonstrate that even at one of their darkest hours, African Americans sheltered and nurtured a hope that would lead to wholesale changes upon the American legal and political landscape.