Independence Day in the United States is officially celebrated on 4 July, but for many Americans the 1776 Declaration of Independence did not signal freedom. Instead, Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation recognized and proclaimed freedom for enslaved people, even though the news did not reach all of them for several years. Juneteenth celebrations commemorate …
As of this summer, if you don’t want to lug around the nine-pound Mississippi Encyclopedia, just grab your laptop and the wonders of the state are at your fingertips. Soon there will be an online version of the 1,451-page Mississippi Encyclopedia, a project that began at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in 2003 and concluded with publication in 2017.
The Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters has awarded Center publication The Mississippi Encyclopedia its 2018 Special Achievement Award, and John T. Edge, Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, has received the MIAL Nonfiction award for his book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South.
In honor of the activism of many children and teenagers across the nation, we share two entries from The Mississippi Encyclopedia, one on the Children’s Crusade of Jackson, by historian Daphne Chamberlain, and another on activist Brenda Travis, by Ted Ownby. All photos are from the Moncrief Photograph Collection at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and document activism in Hattiesburg.
On Monday, June 19 at noon there will be a brown bag panel discussion in the Faulkner Room of the J.D. Williams Library about the recently published Mississippi Encyclopedia. Ted Ownby and Charles Reagan Wilson, both editors of the volume, will speak along with library faculty members Andrea Driver, Ellie Campbell, Royce Kurtz, Leigh McWhite, …
The Center’s collection of William Ferris photographs help bring Mississippi Encyclopedia text to life in the Gammill Gallery this month.
The Center, working with the University Press of Mississippi, independent booksellers, and cultural and academic institutions throughout the state, has planned a number of events celebrating the publication of The Mississippi Encyclopedia for the summer and fall of 2017. Each event will include talks by speakers like Encyclopedia senior editors Ted Ownby and Charles Reagan Wilson, subject editors, and scholar-contributors to the volume. We’ll announce who will speak at each event soon.