The Mississippi Encyclopedia


Book Description

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.










Singing in a Strange Land


Book Description

A prizewinning historian pens this biography of C.L. Franklin, the greatest African-American preacher of his generation, father of Aretha, and civil rights pioneer.




Brokered Justice


Book Description

This powerful account of the history of the Mississippi penal system examines the factors that have molded and continue to mold, penal law and administration in that state and sheds new light on the contemporary debate on correctional policy. Beginning with the birth of the Mississippi territory in 1798, Brokered Justice addresses first the continuing legacy of racial inequity in public law from the days of slavery and Jim Crow to the federal judiciary's attempt to confront the problem. The study goes on to explore the specific conflict in Mississippi, a conflict that pits a pragmatic republican political process against the callings of a nobler moral and jurisprudential heritage. Finally, it examines the weaknesses of the correctional ideal within the framework of the state political process and the plight of a convict population subject to an ever-changing body politic. Essential reading for criminologists, public policymakers, historians, correctional practitioners, and all those who care about the inequities in the way society treats offenders, especially African-Americans, Brokered Justice challenges prevailing views of the relationship between criminal justice and the political system and shatters simplistic notions of crime and punishment.













Affect and Power


Book Description

In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan published his groundbreaking work White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 and opened up new avenues for thinking about sex, slavery, race, and religion in American culture. Over the course of a forty-year career at the University of California and the University of Mississippi, he continued to write about these issues and to train others to think in new ways about interactions of race, gender, faith, and power. Written by former students of Jordan, these essays are a tribute to the career of one of America's great thinkers and perhaps the most influential American historian of his generation. The book visits historical locales from Puritan New England and French Louisiana to nineteenth-century New York and Mississippi, all the way to Harlem swing clubs and college campuses in the twentieth century. In the process, authors listen to the voices of abolitionists and white supremacists, preachers and politicos, white farm women and black sorority sisters, slaves, and jazz musicians. Each essay represents an important contribution to the collection's larger themes and at the same time illustrates the impact Jordan exerted on the scholarly life of each author. Collectively, these pieces demonstrate the attentiveness to detail and sensitivity to sources that are hallmarks of Jordan's own work.




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Book Description