History
Funkiest Man Alive
Rufus Thomas may not be a household name, but he is widely regarded as the patriarch of Memphis R&B, and his music influenced three generations. His first singles in the early 1950s were recorded as blues ...
With Hawks and Angels
With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life chronicles the fortunate life of a man born in the Cajun country of Louisiana and his interaction with the three distinct parts of his home state: ...
William Levi Dawson
William Levi Dawson (1899–1990) overcame adversity and Jim Crow racism to become a nationally recognized composer, choral arranger, conductor, and professor of music. In William Levi Dawson: American ...
A Slow, Calculated Lynching
In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, countless Black citizens endured violent resistance and even death while fighting for their constitutional rights. One of those citizens, Clyde Kennard ...
The Struggle of Struggles
From 1955 to 1975, Vera Pigee (1924–2007) put her life and livelihood on the line with grassroots efforts for social change in Mississippi, principally through her years of leadership in Coahoma County’s ...
The Speeches of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner
Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1915) was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of America’s earliest Black activists and social reformers, and an outspoken proponent of emigration. In ...
Old Southwest to Old South
Mississippi’s foundational epoch—in which the state literally took shape—has for too long remained overlooked and shrouded in misunderstanding. Yet the years between 1798, when the Mississippi Territory ...
Into the Jungle!
Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold the Pacific ...
Boy and Girl Tramps of America
In 1933 and 1934, Thomas Minehan, a young sociologist at the University of Minnesota, joined the ranks of a roving army of 250,000 boys and girls torn from their homes during the Great Depression. Disguised ...
Carnival in Alabama
Mobile is simultaneously a typical and unique city in the postwar United States. It was a quintessential boomtown during World War II. That prosperity was followed by a period of rapid urban decline and ...