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.
About the Author: 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 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 is former associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and coeditor of numerous scholarly collections from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Odie Lindsey teaches at Vanderbilt University and is author of We Come to Our Senses and other works of fiction. James G. Thomas, Jr., is associate director at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture. He is an editor of a variety of works that focus on the American South, including The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.