Elvis Presley, or better known as simply Elvis, was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on January 8, 1935. Even after his untimely death, this Mississippian still remains a pop icon. He rose from a humble beginning in Mississippi to launch a rock and roll revolution with his charismatic stage presence and distinctive voice.
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. “B.B.” King is, in many ways, reflective of the early hard lives of most Delta blues musicians. No study of Mississippi’s rich cultural history is complete without including the Delta blues and its practitioners, now studied, sung, and imitated around the world.
The ferocity of Hurricane Katrina etched the date August 29, 2005, in the minds of everyone who experienced it. South Mississippians, and the thousands of people from across the country who came to their aid, are forever shaped by the disaster and its aftermath.
In the 20th century, Mississippi legislators were twice called upon to act on two constitutional amendments that had major implications for American women. The first for their consideration was the woman suffrage amendment which was ratified in 1920 and became the Nineteenth Amendment.
The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was created in March 1956 by an act of the Mississippi Legislature. It came in the wake of the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka public school desegregation ruling by the U. S. Supreme Court. The court ruled that laws enforcing segregated schools were unconstitutional and called for desegregation of schools “with all deliberate speed.”
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. Whether the need was for rural hospitals and affordable health insurance, production of a fertilizer that increased crop yield for a hungry world, better race relations, or spreading Southern Baptist missions around the globe, Cooper repeatedly led Mississippians to work together and make the seemingly impossible possible.
World War II was truly a world war. All of the major countries and a large number of small nations were drawn into the fight. Even countries that tried to remain neutral found themselves in the conflict either by conquest or by being in the path of the campaigns of the major powers. For example, in 1940, more than a year before the United States entered the war, the major powers — Britain, Italy, and Germany — fought important battles in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya in North Africa.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mississippi was an overwhelmingly agricultural state. While farming provided a route to economic success for many White Mississippians, a number of White people could always be found at the bottom of the agricultural ladder, working as tenant farmers or sharecroppers, a status more typically associated with Black Mississippians in the century after the American Civil War.
By 1932 the Great Depression had the country in its relentless grip and most Americans believed that something was very wrong.