Mississippi Stories

The Mississippi Stories website, launched in July 2016, seeks to tell the complex story of Mississippi and Mississippians through multiple forms of documentary practice: film, photography, oral history, and sound. The website presents work by students, staff, faculty, and alumni of the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture, including Center institutes and partners Living Blues magazine, the Southern Documentary Project, and the Southern Foodways Alliance.

The Center will post new stories periodically. Some of these will be finished and complete projects, and others will be snapshots of work in progress, or outtakes from larger projects. Some projects will explore topics outside the state of Mississippi, but all the documentarians learn and practice at the Center, based in Oxford.

The site will also make available archival documentary work created since the Center’s founding in 1977. This archival work will include publications constructed from documentary work, like magazines Rejoice! and Old Time Country. We hope that publishing materials from previous decades will encourage thoughtful discussions about how documentary work–how people do it and define it, how it uses scholarship, relates to scholarship, and is part of scholarship, and how best to share it with a public–may have changed over the years.