Mississippi

The flag is adapted from the Stars and Bars while the Battle Flag appears in the top left hand area. The colours recall the tricolore (French flag).

Locator map for the US state of Mississippi.

State in the south of the USA, bordered to the north by Tennessee, to the east by Alabama, to the south by the Gulf of Mexico, Arkansas, and Louisiana, and to the west the Mississippi River separates it from Arkansas and Louisiana; area 121,489 sq km/46,907 sq mi; population (2000) 2,844,700; capital and largest city Jackson. The state lies entirely within the East Gulf Coastal Plain and the Mississippi Alluvial Plain. Along the state's short coastline are many small islands. Traditionally based on agriculture, the economy of Mississippi is now led by manufacturing and service industries; petroleum and natural gas industries are also important to the state economy. Industrial products include furniture, wood products, and transport equipment; cotton is a leading crop and other agricultural products include poultry, cattle, and rice. Major cities include Gulfport, Biloxi, Hattiesburg, Greenville, Meridian, Tupelo, Southaven, Vicksburg, and Pascagoula. Mississippi's original inhabitants were the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez American Indian peoples. Part of the Deep South, the state is historically associated with cotton plantations, slavery, and blues music. Mississippi was admitted to the Union in 1817 as the 20th US state.

Physical Mississippi divides into two main land regions: the Mississippi Alluvial Plain and the East Gulf Coastal Plain. The Mississippi Alluvial Plain, often known as the Delta, lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers on the western border of the state. This region was traditionally prone to some of the most disastrous floods in US history. Today it is generally swampy, with ridges for preventing flooding (called levees). Reservoirs and modern drainage systems allow the cultivation of soybeans, rice, and cotton. Mississippi's soils have been badly eroded by flooding, and the reforestation of watershed areas and the conversion of cotton-growing land to pasture are some of the measures taken to improve fertility.

The rest of the state consists of the low hills of the East Gulf Coastal Plain, which rise from the marshy Gulf Coast to the state's highest point at Woodall Mountain (246 m/806 ft) in the northeastern Tennessee River Hills. Along the western edge of the East Gulf Coastal Plain are the low-lying Bluff Hills, or Loess Hills. East of these hills are the North-Central Hills and further east still are the Flatwoods, the Pontotoc Ridge, and the Black Prairie regions.

Southern Mississippi has a narrow strip of prairie and a band of pine forests. Nearer to the coast are stretches of grassland known as the coastal meadows, but soils here are too swampy to be efficiently farmed. The state's rivers belong to the Mississippi River system and drain into the Gulf of Mexico. The main tributaries to the Mississippi are the Yazoo, Big Black, and Homochitto rivers. Other rivers include the Pearl, Pascagoula, Leaf, and Chickasawhay. The Tennessee River and the headwaters of the Tombigbee River drain the northeastern hills.

There are no large natural lakes in Mississippi but the largest artificial lakes are the Arkabutla Lake, Sardis Lake, Grenada Lake, and Ross Barnett Reservoir. Oxbow lakes (curved lakes found on the flood plain of a river) are a common feature all along the Mississippi River, where other rivers meander. Mississippi's short coastline is heavily indented with many barrier islands, the largest of which are the Cat, Ship, Horn, and Petit Bois islands. Between them and the mainland is the Mississippi Sound.

Mississippi has a subtropical climate in the south, where rainfall is greatest, and a more temperate climate in the north. Summers are long and humid and winters are generally very mild.

Mississippi remains over 50% forested and many of the six national forests in the state have undergone replanting. Trees include many kinds of oak, cottonwood, hickory, willow, and sycamore. In swampy areas, bald cypress and sweet gum are more common. Longleaf pines are concentrated in the southern part of the state and on the Gulf coast live oaks with draped Spanish moss are found. The magnolia is the state tree and other common shrubs include huckleberry, mountain laurel, sassafras, American holly, and hazel. Wild flowers and flowering trees include dogwood, red maple, azalea, silver bell, rhododendron, black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, aster, and ironweed. Common mammals are the white-tailed deer, armadillo, fox, raccoon, opossum, skunk, woodchuck, cottontail rabbit, squirrel, and weasel. Mississippi has a wide range of bird species, and is especially known for its duck and quail populations. The Mississippi flyway is a major migratory bird route. Permanent residents include egrets, bitterns, and other marshland birds as well as many kinds of warbler, bunting, and woodpecker in the state's dense forests. Mississippi is also home to alligators, turtles, frogs, and terrapins in its coastal swamps, while fish include largemouth bass, buffalo fish, carp, bullhead, bluegill, channel catfish, paddle fish, and crappie. In the state's coastal waters red and black drum, spotted sea trout, king and Spanish mackerel, mullet, croaker, tarpon, pompano, and flounder, as well as shrimps, blue crabs, and oysters are all found.

Features The coastal part of the state forms part of the Gulf Islands National Seashore, a recreation area stretching from Biloxi in Mississippi to Pensacola in Florida; at the coastal city of Pascagoula are Fort Massachusetts and Old Spanish Fort (1718), the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley. There are many casinos along the coast. Biloxi is home to the Biloxi Lighthouse (1848); the Biloxi Mardi Gras Museum; the George E Ohr Arts and Cultural Center, featuring some 250 pottery works; the J L Scott Marine Educational Center, with Mississippi's largest aquarium; and the Maritime and Seafood Industry Museum. Beauvoir was the last home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

Further inland, Mississippi has many remnants of Southern plantation life, such as the fine antebellum mansions of the Natchez National Historical Park. Jackson has many Greek Revival buildings, including the old capitol building from the 1830s (now the State Historical Museum), City Hall (1847), the Mississippi Governor's Mansion (1841), and Smith Robertson Museum, formerly the first public school for black children in the city, now a museum devoted to black life in the state. Historic features in Oxford include Courthouse Square and Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner (1844). The Elvis Presley Park and Elvis Presley Memorial Chapel are located at Tupelo, Presley's birthplace.

In Vicksburg there is the Old Courthouse Museum, with Confederacy artefacts, and the Cairo, a restored Civil War gunboat. The Sam Dale State Historic Site, near Daleville, is a tribute to General Sam Dale, a frontiersman of the War of 1812. Major Civil War sites include Vicksburg National Military Park and Vicksburg National Cemetery; Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site; and Tupelo National Battlefield. Part of Natchez Trace Parkway, a historic American Indian and pioneer route, crosses the state. Mississippi's national forests are De Soto National Forest, covering more than 2,025 sq km/780 sq mi in the southeast, Bienville, Delta, Holly Springs, Homochitto, and Tombigbee. The Nanih Waiya State Historic Site, in east-central Mississippi, features a Choctaw sacred mound and there is a Choctaw reservation in Neshoba County. Oxford is home to the university museums at the University of Mississippi, with collections in the fields of archaeology, art, anthropology, decorative arts, history, science, and technology.

Culture Mississippi is a relatively poor state, with a large number of inhabitants living on or below the poverty line. Owing to its long history of segregation, Mississippi still has the highest illiteracy rate in the country. Since the 1960s, African-American Mississippians have been better represented in local and state government. Yet as recently as 1992 the US Supreme Court ordered the state college system to end its tradition of segregation.

Mississippi remains divided by a legacy of racist attitudes and its Confederate heritage. It also has an exceptionally high rate of incarceration, especially among young African-American males. Mississippi has a strong Christian church-going culture with a long tradition of gospel music. Blues music is perhaps Mississippi's most characteristic and best-known cultural tradition, and country music is also important. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Oxford preserves and facilitates access to traditional Southern music (it has the world's largest blues archive), folklore, and literature. Writers associated with Mississippi include William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, and Richard Wright.

Confederate heritage culture is very much in evidence during the Natchez Spring Pilgrimage, as well as on Confederate Memorial Day, with pageants and tours of the antebellum mansions and their grounds. Similar celebrations take place at Aberdeen, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Holly Springs, and Columbus. One of the most popular events in Mississippi is the annual Biloxi Shrimp Festival in June, featuring the crowning of a queen and the blessing of the shrimp fleet. Mardi Gras is celebrated at Pascagoula and Natchez. At most festivals and events, Delta blues music is played, including at the Dixie National Livestock Show and Rodeo in Jackson, the second-largest rodeo east of the Mississippi River.

Mississippi has three art museums: the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, with European and US art, American Indian baskets, English Georgian silver, Japanese woodblock prints, and an extensive art history library; Mississippi's largest art museum, the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, with 19th- and 20th-century US landscape paintings, 18th-century British paintings and furniture, Japanese prints, pre-Columbian ceramics, Oceanic art, and a large number of works by Mississippi and Southern artists; and the Walter Anderson Museum of Art at Ocean Springs, devoted to works by the Southern artist. The university museums at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, feature an extensive collection of Southern folk art, with works of Oxford artist Theora Hamblett, the Meyer-Fulton Collection of West African art, and the Lewisohn Collection of Caribbean folk art. Jackson is now the USA's host city for the International Ballet Competition and is home to an opera company, the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra, and several professional theatre companies. There is an annual Natchez Opera Festival.

Famous bluesmen associated with the Mississippi Delta include Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and B B King. Country music is another important tradition and the musical legacy of Jimmie Rodgers and Elvis Presley is widely celebrated. Choral, organ, and ancient music are also popular and there are many music schools in the state.

Arts festivals include the Mississippi Arts Festival and the Jubilee Jam Art and Music Festival, both held annually in Jackson. Also in Jackson is the Mississippi Sky Parade. During midsummer at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, it is traditional for people in the town to decamp to cabins on the fairgrounds for the entire week of the fair, and state politicians generally open their campaigns there in order to gain maximum attention.

Mississippi is a strongly rural state and hunting remains a popular activity, particularly of quail. Fishing is also a major pastime. The Mississippi Fair and Dairy Show is held at Meridian in the first week in October, and the Mississippi State Fair in October at Jackson.

Quarter-Horse breeding is important. Tennis, golf, and swimming are popular leisure activities, particularly in the tourist resorts of the coast.

Government Mississippi's state constitution The constitution is an amended version of that of 1890. Previous constitutions had been adopted in 1817, 1832, and 1869.

Structure of state government The Mississippi legislature consists of a 52-member Senate and a 122-member House of Representatives. All legislators are elected to four-year terms. Mississippi sends five representatives and two senators to the US Congress. The state has six electoral votes in presidential elections.

The chief executive of Mississippi is the governor, who is elected for a four-year term and may serve two successive terms. Mississippi's highest court, the supreme court, has nine justices popularly elected to eight-year terms. The justice with seniority of service becomes chief justice for the remainder of his or her term. The major trial courts have a total of 79 judges, popularly elected to four-year terms. Mississippi is divided into 82 counties, each of which is administered by an elected five-member board of supervisors. The state also has a total of more than 290 cities and towns.

Economy Mississippi is traditionally an agricultural state but its economy is now more generally led by manufacturing and service industries. Industrial products include clothing, furniture, lumber and wood products, food processing, electrical machinery, and transport equipment. Petroleum and natural gas are largely state-managed industries of considerable importance, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) plays a key role in the management of Mississippi's mineral resources. Small oilfields are scattered across southern Mississippi, with gas also concentrated in the south; minerals include sand and gravel, Portland cement, clays, and crushed stone.

Agriculture in Mississippi, historically based on cotton - which remains a leading crop - has diversified to include poultry, cattle, soybeans, dairy products, and rice. Mississippi is a leading catfish-producing state and fish farming is a major growth industry. Fishing and seafood processing are particularly important on the coast and shrimps, oysters, and menhaden are the most important catches. Tourism, gambling, and casinos are big business in Biloxi and in northwestern Mississippi. The US Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg is the world's largest hydraulic research laboratory.

History Early inhabitants and settlement Moundbuilders were the first inhabitants of the Mississippi area and burial mounds can still be seen at many sites along rivers, including what is now Mounds Park in St Paul. Mississippi's original inhabitants were the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez American Indian tribes. Hernando De Soto explored parts of Mississippi during his expedition 1539-42, but, as no gold or silver were discovered, the Spanish did not continue to explore the region. The first permanent European settlement was a French colony, established in 1699 by Pierre le Moyne in Biloxi Bay. The French Mississippi Company under John Law attracted further settlement, and Mississippi was considered part of French Louisiana until it was ceded to England in 1763.

English and Spanish control English colonists rapidly developed a plantation economy centred on tobacco and indigo production and based in Natchez. Natchez was subsequently captured for Spain by Bernardo de Gálvez in 1779. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 saw Mississippi pass to US control, although Spain contested territorial boundaries, resulting in the extended West Florida Controversy. Eventually, as a result of the Pinckney Treaty (1795), Spain accepted a new northern boundary to its territory but remained in occupation in Mississippi until US troops forced Spain to evacuate Natchez in 1798. In 1805 Zebulon Montgomery Pike explored upper Mississippi, and by the 1830s a significant lumber industry was in development.

Statehood and Civil War The new US Mississippi Territory benefited greatly from the combined effects of the Yazoo land fraud (which resulted in Georgia first selling and then ceding its western land claims to Mississippi) and the Louisiana Purchase, and a land boom ensued. As settlers farmed the cheaply obtained land and reaped high prices in cotton crops, wealth in the region rapidly accumulated. A political elite developed in the Natchez plantation region. Mississippi became a state in 1817 and adopted a new constitution in 1832; American Indians were gradually forced to move west as settlement and the competition for land ownership increased. Thousands of African Americans were brought into the state to work as slaves on the burgeoning cotton plantations. A defiantly pro-slavery state, on 9 January 1861 Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union, and Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederacy. Civil War fighting reached Mississippi in April 1862, when Union forces claimed victory at Corinth and Iuka. The Battle of Vicksburg was the last major battle but General William Sherman's march across the state wreaked further destruction. The legacy of the Civil War remains; in April 2001 voters decided in a referendum to retain the state flag, which was the only state flag still to show the Confederate battle cross.

Reconstruction Mississippi abolished slavery but refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. As a result, during Reconstruction the state was occupied by federal troops and was only readmitted to the Union in 1870 after ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment. Soon after federal troops left the state, however, racial tensions escalated and the Ku Klux Klan began to gain popular support. In 1890, Mississippi politicians set a precedent for white supremacist ideology with a revised state constitution that entrenched racial segregation, a model followed by other southern states. The constitution's emphasis on literacy effectively disenfranchised most African Americans in the state. Although the sharecropping system had replaced the dismantled plantation system, white landowners remained dominant and powerful, and, especially in the Delta, black tenants worked on the area's large farms in a state of virtual servitude. The Jim Crow laws and a 1926 ban on teaching evolution in public schools were further setbacks to social progress in Mississippi, and reactionary Prohibition laws lasted from 1908 until 1959.

Civil rights In terms of social justice, Mississippi declined as the 20th century progressed; in 1948, the state rejected the national Democratic party's stand on civil rights and instead turned to Strom Thurmond, the candidate of the States' Rights Democratic Party (popularly known as the Dixiecrats), for president. Mississippi resisted desegregation during the 1950s and set up citizen councils, dedicated to maintaining segregation. White Mississippi's reactionary politics were most clearly embodied in the 1968 presidential candidate, George Wallace of Alabama, who famously opposed integration. The 1960s were a time of extreme turbulence and social upheaval in Mississippi. In 1962 two people were killed in riots and federal troops were called upon to restore order after the state government attempted to block the admission of James H Meredith, an African American, to the University of Mississippi law school. A period of violence against African Americans followed, as churches and homes were bombed or set on fire. Medgar Evers, an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was killed in 1963 and in 1964 three civil-rights workers were murdered. The Voting Rights Act 1965 allowed black Mississippians to register and vote, and in 1967 African Americans at last gained access to the legislature.

Late 20th century Mississippi struggled economically throughout the 1980s as its economy adjusted from agriculture to manufacturing, and many innovative measures were deployed in order to achieve economic balance. Following the Mississippi Gaming Control Act of June 1990, gambling was legalized in nine of Mississippi's 82 counties and the first casino opened in Biloxi in 1992. Gambling subsequently became an important factor in the state's economy and tourism; the state's traditions of southern culture, music, and the blues, are also important to tourism.

In August 1969 Mississippi and Louisiana were struck by Hurricane Camille, one of the century's worst hurricanes, and in April 1973 Mississippi was severely flooded, with devastating effects.

Famous people sport Walter Payton (1954-1999), American footballer

the arts William Faulkner (1897-1962), author; Richard Wright (1908-1960), author; Eudora Welty (1909-2001), novelist; Howlin' Wolf (1910-1976), blues musician; Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), playwright; Muddy Waters (1915-1983), blues musician; Shelby Foote (1916- ), historian and writer; John Lee Hooker (1917-2001), blues guitarist; B B King (1925- ), blues guitarist; Bo Diddley (1928- ), rhythm and blues guitarist; Elvis Presley (1935-1977), singer and actor; Tammy Wynette (1942-1998), country music singer; Richard Ford (1944- ), author; Oprah Winfrey (1954- ), actor and talk-show host

society and education Charles Evers (1922- ), civil-rights leader; Medgar Evers (1925-1963), civil-rights leader.