The Mississippi Encyclopedia
The Mississippi Encyclopedia
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.
At 1,451 pages and nearly 9 pounds, The Mississippi Encyclopedia is something to behold.
[The editors’] approach is sound, their choices are judicious, the quality is consistent, and the scholarship is impressive. The Mississippi Encyclopedia is a significant scholarly statement about where a southern state is—politically, intellectually, and culturally—at the first decades of a new century.
Ted Ownby (Editor)
Ted Ownby is William F. Winter Professor of History and professor of southern studies at the University of Mississippi. He is editor of The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, Manners and Southern History, The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, and Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South and coeditor of Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, The Mississippi Encyclopedia,and Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
Charles Reagan Wilson (Editor)
Charles Reagan Wilson recently retired as the Kelly Gene Cook Chair of History and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and is the author of multiple works of southern history and general editor of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Ann J. Abadie (Editor)
Ann J. Abadie (1939–2024) was associate director emerita of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi as well as coeditor of numerous scholarly collections from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference and other books published by University Press of Mississippi.
Odie Lindsey (Editor)
Odie Lindsey teaches at Vanderbilt University and is author of We Come to Our Senses and other works of fiction.
James G. Thomas Jr. (Editor)
James G. Thomas, Jr., is associate director for publications at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is an editor of the twenty-four-volume New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and The Mississippi Encyclopedia;coeditor (with Jay Watson) of Faulkner and Print Culture, Faulkner and History, and Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas; and editor of Conversations with Barry Hannah. His work has appeared in Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century, Southern Cultures, Southern Quarterly,and Living Blues.
