State in SE US; nicknamed Magnolia State/Bayou State
area 123,600 sq km/47,710 sq mi
capital Jackson
towns and cities Biloxi, Meridian, Hattiesburg
features Mississippi, Pearl, and Big Black rivers; Mississippi Delta; Gulf Islands national seashore; Jackson, with many Greek Revival buildings, including the old capitol building from the 1830s (now the State Historical Museum), City Hall (1847), the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion (1841), and Smith Robertson Museum (formerly the first public school for black children in the city, now a museum devoted to black life in the state); Oxford, with Courthouse Square (including Lafayette County Courthouse), Rowan Oak (1844, the home of William Faulkner), and the Center for Study of Southern Culture in Barnard Observatory (with the world’s largest blues archive); Natchez, with cotton plantation mansions built in the first half of the 19th century, preserved with the help of the Natchez Pilgrimage, including Rosalie (1823), Magnolia Hall (1858), Stanton Hall (1857), and Longwood (1860, the largest octagonal house in the US); Vicksburg national military park (Civil War site); Port Gibson, with the First Presbyterian C
hurch (1859, with a 3.6-m/12-ft hand pointing up from the spire), restored houses and churches on Church Street, including the Disharoon House and Gage House (1830s) and Temple Gemiluth Chassed (1892, a synagogue in the Byzantine style); Grand Gulf Military Monument; Emerald Mound, a Native American mound dating from c. 1300; Civil War sites at Corinth; University of Mississippi (1848); Elvis Presley’s birthplace at Tupelo, with the Elvis Presley Park and Elvis Presley Memorial Chapel; Natchez Trace Parkway; the Biedenharn Candy Company, Vicksburg, where Coca-Cola was first bottled 1894, now a Coca-Cola museum
products cotton, rice, soy beans, chickens, fish and shellfish, lumber and wood products, petroleum and natural gas, transportation equipment, chemicals

famous people Jefferson Davis, William Faulkner, Elvis Presley, Leontyne Price, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright
history first explored by Hernando de Soto for Spain 1540; settled by the French 1699, the English 1763; ceded to US 1798; statehood achieved 1817. After secession from the Union during the Civil War, it was readmitted 1870.
Mississippi was the scene of heavy fighting during the Civil War that left it devastated. Tenant farming replaced plantations, and only in the mid-1960s did manufacturing pass farming as a source of jobs. The legal segregation of blacks was dismantled during this period. Mississippi remains the poorest of the states in many respects, including personal income per head of population.
1. A major North American river and the chief river of the United States; rises in northern Minnesota and flows southward into the Gulf of Mexico; Also called: Mississippi River.
2. A state in the Deep South on the gulf of Mexico; one of the Confederate States during the American Civil War; Also called: Magnolia State.
River in the US, the main arm of the great river system draining the US between the Appalachian and the Rocky mountains. The length of the Mississippi is 3,780 km/2,350 mi; with its tributary the Missouri 6,020 km/3,740 mi.
The Mississippi rises in the lake region of N Minnesota, with St Anthony Falls at Minneapolis. Below the tributaries Minnesota, Wisconsin, Des Moines, and Illinois, the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi occurs at St Louis. Turning at the Ohio junction, it passes Memphis, and takes in the St Francis, Arkansas, Yazoo, and Red tributaries before reaching its delta on the Gulf of Mexico beyond New Orleans.
In spring, warm air from the Gulf of Mexico collides with cold fronts from the north to create tornadoes along the Red River, a western tributary. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto reached a point on the Mississippi near present-day Memphis 1541. The Sieur de La Salle, a French explorer, reached the river's mouth 1682 after descending from the Great Lakes. Before the coming of the railroad, river commerce was of greater importance, and the securing of the Mississippi 1861–63, in the American Civil War, was a vital objective of the Union forces.
Levees extend over more than 1,600 mi/2,575 km of its course because of the potentially dangerous spring flooding, as in 1993. St Louis is the chief central port on its banks. Waterborne commerce consists mainly of bulk commodities such as petroleum and petroleum products, grain, and iron ore. Passenger traffic was important during the 19th century, today excursion boats, especially paddle-wheel craft, provide day trips or longer cruises.
The river was listed 1994 as in danger of ecological collapse, being polluted by waste from towns, mines, farms, and barge traffic, and its water flow impeded by dams and levees.