What is Parenting?
Parenting or child rearing is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the intricacies of raising a child and not exclusively to the biological relationship.
The most common caretaker in parenting is the biological parent(s) of the child in question, although others may be an older sibling, a grandparent, a legal guardian, aunt, uncle or other family member, or a family friend. Governments and society may also have a role in child-rearing. In many cases, orphaned or abandoned children receive parental care from non-parent blood relations. Others may be adopted, raised in foster care, or placed in an orphanage. Parenting skills vary, and a parent with good parenting skills may be referred to as a good parent.
Parenting styles vary by historical time period, race/ethnicity, social class, and other social features. Additionally, research has supported that parental history both in terms of attachments of varying quality as well as parental psychopathology, particularly in the wake of adverse experiences, can strongly influence parental sensitivity and child outcomes.
Factors that affect decisions
Main article: Parenting styles
Social class, wealth, culture and income have a very strong impact on what methods of child rearing parents use. Cultural values play a major role in how a parent raises their child. However, parenting is always evolving; as times, cultural practices, social norms, and traditions change.
In psychology, the parental investment theory suggests that basic differences between males and females in parental investment have great adaptive significance and lead to gender differences in mating propensities and preferences.
A family’s social class plays a large role in the opportunities and resources that will be available to a child. Working-class children often grow up at a disadvantage with the schooling, communities, and level of parental attention available compared to middle-class or upper-class. Also, lower working-class families do not get the kind of networking that the middle and upper classes do through helpful family members, friends, and community individuals or groups as well as various professionals or experts.
Main article: Parenting styles
A parenting style is indicative of the overall emotional climate in the home. Developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three main parenting styles in early child development: authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive. These parenting styles were later expanded to four, to include an uninvolved style. On the one hand, these four styles involve combinations of acceptance and responsiveness, and on the other hand, involve demand and control. Research has found that parenting style is significantly related to a child’s subsequent mental health and well-being. In particular, authoritative parenting is positively related to mental health and satisfaction with life, and authoritarian parenting is negatively related to these variables.
- Authoritative parenting
- Described by Baumrind as the “just right” style, it combines a medium level demands on the child and a medium level responsiveness from the parents. Authoritative parents rely on positive reinforcement and infrequent use of punishment. Parents are more aware of a child’s feelings and capabilities and support the development of a child’s autonomy within reasonable limits. There is a give-and-take atmosphere involved in parent-child communication and both control and support are balanced. Research shows that this style is more beneficial than the too-hard authoritarian style or the too-soft permissive style.
- Authoritarian parenting styles
- Authoritarian parents are very rigid and strict. High demands are placed on the child, but there is little responsiveness to them. Parents who practice authoritarian style parenting have a non-negotiable set of rules and expectations that are strictly enforced and require rigid obedience. When the rules are not followed, punishment is often used to promote future obedience. There is usually no explanation of punishment except that the child is in trouble for breaking a rule. This parenting style is strongly associated with corporal punishment, such as spanking and “Because I said so” is a typical response to a child’s question of authority. This type of parenting is seen more often in working-class families than in the middle class. In 1983 Diana Baumrind found that children raised in an authoritarian-style home were less cheerful, more moody and more vulnerable to stress. In many cases these children also demonstrated passive hostility.
- Permissive parenting
- Permissive, or indulgent, parenting is more popular in middle-class than in working-class families. In these settings, a child’s freedom and autonomy are highly valued, and parents tend to rely mostly on reasoning and explanation. Parents are undemanding, so there tends to be little if any punishment or explicit rules in this style of parenting. These parents say that their children are free from external constraints and tend to be highly responsive to whatever the child wants at the time. Children of permissive parents are generally happy but sometimes show low levels of self-control and self-reliance because they lack structure at home.
- Uninvolved parenting
- An uninvolved or neglectful parenting style is when parents are often emotionally or physically absent. They have little to no expectation of the child and regularly have no communication. They are not responsive to a child’s needs and have little to no behavioral expectations. If present, they may provide what the child needs for survival with little to no engagement.There is often a large gap between parents and children with this parenting style. Children with little or no communication with their own parents tended to be victimized by other children and may themselves be exhibit deviant behavior.Children of uninvolved parents suffer in social competence, academic performance, psychosocial development and problem behavior.
There is no single definitive model of parenting. With authoritarian and permissive parenting on opposite sides of the spectrum, most conventional and modern models of parenting fall somewhere in between. Parenting strategies, as well as behaviors and ideals of what parents expect, (whether communicated verbally and/or non-verbally) can also play a significant role in a child’s development.
A parenting practice is a specific behavior that a parent uses in raising a child. For example, a common parent practice intended to promote academic success is reading books to the child. Storytelling is an important parenting practice for children in many Indigenous American communities.
Parenting practices reflect the cultural understanding of children. Parents in individualistic countries like Germany spend more time engaged in face-to-face interaction with babies and more time talking to the baby about the baby. Parents in more communal cultures, such as West African cultures, spend more time talking to the baby about other people, and more time with the baby facing outwards, so that the baby sees what the mother sees. Children develop skills at different rates as a result of differences in these culturally driven parenting practices. Children in individualistic cultures learn to act independently and to recognize themselves in a mirror test at a younger age than children whose cultures promote communal values. However, these independent children learn self-regulation and cooperation later than children in communal cultures. In practice, this means that a child in an independent culture will happily play by themselves, but a child in a communal culture is more likely to follow their parents instruction to pick up their toys. Children that grow up in communities with a collaborative orientation to social interaction, such as some Indigenous American communities, are also able to self-regulate and become very self-confident, while remaining involved in the community.
In Kenya, Africa, many male parents are not encouraged to be involved in their children’s lives till they are about 12 years old.
Parenting skills are the guiding forces of a “good parent” to lead a child into a healthy adult, they influence on development, maintenance, and cessation of children’s negative and positive behaviors. Parenting takes a lot of skill and patience and is constant work and growth. The cognitive potential, social skills, and behavioral functioning a child acquires during the early years are fundamentally dependent on the quality of their interactions with their parents.
Canadian Council on Learning says that children benefit most (avoids poor developmental outcomes) when their parents:
- Communicate truthfully about events or discussions that have happened, because authenticity from parents who explain and help their children understand on what happened and how they were involved if they were without giving defining rules will create a realistic aptitude within children’s growing psyche;
- Stay consistent, as children need structure: parents that institute regular routines see benefits in their children’s behavioral pattern;
- Utilize resources available to them, reaching out into the community and building a supportive social network;
- Take more interest in their child’s educational and early development needs (e.g. Play that enhances socialization, autonomy, cohesion, calmness and trust.); and
- Keep an open communication and stay educated on what their child is seeing, learning and doing and how it is affecting them.
Parenting skills are often assumed to be self-evident or naturally present in parents. But those who come from a negative/vulnerable environment might tend to pass on what they suffered onto their families oppressed by their own experiences, those who have inaccurate beliefs or poorer understanding of developmental milestones only engage in the way they know which may result in problematic parenting. Parenting practices are at particular risk during marital transitions like separation, divorce and remarriage; if children fail to adequately adjust to these changes, they would be at risk of negative outcomes for example increased rule-breaking behavior, problems with peer relationships and increased emotional difficulties. Urie Bronfenbrenner said on this matter that “Every kid needs one adult who is crazy about [them].” Virginia Satir emphasized on these views by stating “Parenting…the most complicated job in the world.”
Research classifies competence and skills required in parenting as follows:
- Parent-child relationship skills: quality time spend, positive communications and delighting affection.
- Encouraging desirable behavior: praise and encouragement, nonverbal attention, facilitating engaging activities.
- Teaching skills and behaviors: being a good example, incidental teaching, benevolent communication of the skill with role playing & other methods, communicating logical incentives and consequences.
- Managing misbehavior: establishing assertive ground rules/limit setting, directed discussion, providing clear and calm instructions, communicate and enforce appropriate consequences for problem behavior, using restrictive means like quiet time and time out with authoritative stance and not authoritarian.
- Anticipating and planning: advanced planning and preparation for readying the child for challenges, finding out engaging and age appropriate developmental activities, preparing token economy for self-management practice with guidance, holding follow-up discussions, identifying possible negative developmental trajectories.
- Self-regulation skills: Monitoring behaviors (own and children’s), setting developmentally appropriate goals, evaluating strengths and weaknesses and setting practice tasks for skills improvement, monitoring & preventing internalizing and externalizing behaviors, setting personal goals for positive change.
- Mood and coping skills: reframing and discouraging unhelpful thoughts (diversions, goal orientation and mindfulness), stress and tension management (for self and in the house), developing personal coping statements and plans for high-risk situations, developing mutual respect and consideration between members of the family, positive involvement: engaging in support and strength oriented collaborative activities/rituals for enhancing interpersonal relationships.
- Partner support skills: improving personal communication, giving and receiving constructive feedback and support, avoiding negative family interaction styles, supporting and finding hope in problems for adaptation, collaborative or leading/navigate problem solving, promoting relationship happiness and cordiality.
Consistency is considered as the “backbone” of positive parenting skills and “overprotection” as the weakness.
Parents around the world want what they believe is best for their children. However, parents in different cultures have different ideas of what is best. For example, parents in a hunter–gatherer society or surviving through subsistence agriculture are likely to promote practical survival skills from a young age. Many such cultures begin teaching babies to use sharp tools, including knives, before their first birthdays. This is seen in communities where children have a considerate amount of autonomy at a younger age and are given the opportunity to become skilled in tasks that are sometimes classified as adult work by other cultures. In some Indigenous American communities, child work provides children the opportunity to learn cultural values of collaborative participation and prosocial behavior through observation and participation alongside adults. These communities value respect, participation in the community, and non-interference. The practice of non-interference is an important value in Cherokee culture. It requires that one respects the autonomy of others in the community by not interfering in their decision making by giving unsolicited advice. Indigenous American parents often try to encourage curiosity in their children. Many use a permissive parenting style that enables the child to explore and learn through observation of the world around it.
Differences in values cause parents to interpret different actions in different ways. In some cultures, asking questions is seen by many European American parents as a sign that the child is smart. Italian parents, value social and emotional abilities and having an even temperament. They also value social and emotional competence, and believe that asking questions is a sign that the child has good interpersonal skills. Conversely, Dutch parents value independence, long attention spans, and predictable schedules, so they view asking questions negatively and as a sign that the child is not independent.
The values cultures praise can be more broad than just about a specific topic such as asking questions. parents strongly value intellectual ability, especially in a narrow “book learning” sense. American parents strongly value intellectual ability, especially in a narrow “book learning” sense. Hispanic parents, on the other hand, value respect as a behavioral goal. Along with this, they believe in the idea of putting family above the individual, and emphasize the values of the catholic church. The Kipsigis people of Kenya value children who are not only smart, but who employ that intelligence in a responsible and helpful way, which they call ng/om.Other cultures, such as Sweden and Spain, value more personal values such as being sociable, having security, and happiness. Parents in East Asia come from a culture that values nurturing and governance within families; this is called “guan” [gw-an]. They believe that good parenting comes from order within a household. Even with this value, the concept of psychological control is also more common in this area than anywhere else.
Differences in values can also cause parents to employ different tools to promote their values. Many European American parents expect specially purchased educational toys to improve their children’s intelligence. Some Spanish parents promote social skills by taking their children out for daily walks around the neighborhood.
Games can be used out of school to help reinforce ideas learned in school like looking at a map and playing geography games, downloading educational game software for a computer at home to learn reading, typing, science and math. Games like Wii Fit have even been used to help with patients receiving rehabilitation for knee surgery. Allowing kids time to play video games can help their learning because through video games kids learn memory, hand eye hand eye coordination and visual acuteness. Piaget believed in the “importance of play in learning” this learning can be done both at home and in schools.
Some good educational tools in schools today include online games like Kahoot!, BINGO, language apps like Duolingo, math apps like Sushi Monster, using card games to do addition, subtraction, multiplication. Some schools even use Minecraft for tinkering. Educational games have been proven to have a positive effect on students. Improved learning in educational games include but are not limited to: improved hand eye coordination, memory ability, and visual acuteness. Educational games are linked to technology and many of the games listed above require a device to download the app or computer software. Some of the games only need access to the internet to be played. This play through learning is a great way to keep students engaged and having fun while learning their math facts or work in other subjects.
As well, a recent study in the United Kingdom performed an experiment in hopes of researching if there is a correlation between the use of touch screen devices and brain development in children from ages 6 months to 36 months. In the study they found that the act of scrolling on screens aids with fine motor skills such as stacking blocks. Other skills such under gross motor or language categories had a much less significant effect.
Indigenous American cultures
It is common for parents in many Indigenous American communities to use different tools in parenting such as storytelling —like myths— consejos (Spanish for advice, in this context), educational teasing, nonverbal communication, and observational learning to teach their children important values and life lessons.
Storytelling is a way for Indigenous American children to learn about their identity, community, and cultural history. Indigenous myths and folklore often personify animals and objects, reaffirming the belief that everything possess a soul and must be respected. These stories help preserve language and are used to reflect certain values or cultural histories.
Consejos are a narrative form of advice giving that provides the recipient with maximum autonomy in the situation as a result of their indirect teaching style. Rather than directly informing the child what they should do, the parent instead might tell a story of a similar situation or scenario. The character in the story is used to help the child see what the implications of their decision may be, without directly making the decision for them. This teaches the child to be decisive and independent, while still providing some guidance.
The playful form of teasing is a parenting method used in some Indigenous American communities to keep children out of danger and guide their behavior. This form of teasing utilizes stories, fabrications, or empty threats to guide children in making safe, intelligent decisions. It can teach children values by establishing expectations and encouraging the child to meet them via playful jokes and/or idle threats. For example, a parent may tell a child that there is a monster that jumps on children’s backs if they walk alone at night. This explanation can help keep the child safe because instilling that alarm creates greater awareness and lessens the likelihood that they will wander alone into trouble.
In Navajo families, a child’s development is partly focused on the importance of “respect” for all things as part of the child’s moral and human development. “Respect” in this sense is an emphasis of recognizing the significance of and understanding for one’s relationship with other things and people in the world. Nonverbal communication is much of the way that children learn about such “respect” from parents and other family members.
For example, in a Navajo parenting tool using nonverbal communication, children are initiated at an early age into the practice of an early morning run through any weather condition. This form of guidance fosters “respect” not only for the child’s family members but also to the community as a whole. On this run, the community uses humor and laughter with each other, without directly including the child—who may not wish to get up early and run—to promote the child’s motivation to participate and become an active member of the community. To modify children’s behavior in a nonverbal manner, parents also promote inclusion in the morning runs by placing their child in the snow and having them stay longer if they protest; this is done within a context of warmth, laughter, and community, to help incorporate the child into the practice.
A tool parents use in Indigenous American cultures is to incorporate children into everyday life, including adult activities, to pass on the parents’ knowledge by allowing the child to learn through observation. This practice is known as LOPI, Learning by Observing and Pitching In, where children are integrated into all types of mature daily activities and encouraged to observe and contribute in the community. This inclusion as a parenting tool promotes both community participation and learning.
In some Mayan communities, young girls are not permitted around the hearth, for an extended period of time since corn is sacred. Despite this being an exception to the more common Indigenous American practice of integrating children into all adult activities, including cooking, it is a strong example of observational learning. These Mayan girls can only see their mothers making tortillas in small bits at a time, they will then go and practice the movements their mother used on other objects, such as the example of kneading thin pieces of plastic like a tortilla. From this practice, when a girl comes of age, she is able to sit down and make tortillas without any explicit verbal instruction as a result of her observational learning.
Across the lifespan
Family planning is the decision regarding whether and when to become parents, including planning, preparing, and gathering resources. Prospective parents may assess (among other matters) whether they have access to sufficient financial resources, whether their family situation is stable, and whether they want to undertake the responsibility of raising a child. Worldwide, about 40% of all pregnancies are not planned, and more than 30 million babies are born each year as a result of unplanned pregnancies.
Reproductive health and preconception care affect pregnancy, reproductive success, and the physical and mental health of both mother and child. A woman who is underweight, whether due to poverty, eating disorders, or illness, is less likely to have a healthy pregnancy and give birth to a healthy baby than a woman who is healthy. Similarly, a woman who is obese has higher risks of difficulties, including gestational diabetes. Other health problems, such as infections and iron-deficiency anemia, can be detected and corrected before conception.
Pregnancy and prenatal parenting
Main article: Pregnancy
During pregnancy, the unborn child is affected by many decisions made by the parents, particularly choices linked to their lifestyle. The health, activity level and nutrition available to the mother can affect the child’s development before birth. Some mothers, especially in relatively wealthy countries, eat too much and spend too much time resting. Other mothers, especially if they are poor or abused, may be overworked and may not be able to eat enough, or not able to afford healthful foods with sufficient iron, vitamins, and protein, for the unborn child to develop properly.
Newborns and infants
Main article: Infant
Newborn parenting, is where the responsibilities of parenthood begins. A newborn’s basic needs are food, sleep, comfort and cleaning which the parent provides. An infant’s only form of communication is crying, and attentive parents will begin to recognize different types of crying which represent different needs such as hunger, discomfort, boredom, or loneliness. Newborns and young infants require feedings every few hours which is disruptive to adult sleep cycles. They respond enthusiastically to soft stroking, cuddling and caressing. Gentle rocking back and forth often calms a crying infant, as do massages and warm baths. Newborns may comfort themselves by sucking their thumb or a pacifier. The need to suckle is instinctive and allows newborns to feed. Breastfeeding is the recommended method of feeding by all major infant health organizations. If breastfeeding is not possible or desired, bottle feeding is a common alternative. Other alternatives include feeding breastmilk or formula with a cup, spoon, feeding syringe, or nursing supplementer.The forming of attachments is considered to be the foundation of the infant/child’s capacity to form and conduct relationships throughout life. Attachment is not the same as love and/or affection although they often go together. Attachments develop immediately and a lack of attachment or a seriously disrupted capacity for attachment could potentially do serious damage to a child’s health and well-being. Physically, one may not see symptoms or indications of a disorder but the child may be emotionally affected. Studies show that children with secure attachment have the ability to form successful relationships, express themselves on an interpersonal basis and have higher self-esteem. Conversely children who have caregivers who are neglectful or emotionally unavailable can exhibit behavioral problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder or oppositional defiant disorder Oppositional-defiant disorder is a pattern of disobedient and defiant behavior toward authority figures.
Main article: Toddler
Toddlers are small children range between 12 to 36 months old who are much more active than infants and become challenged with learning how to do simple tasks by themselves. At this stage, parents are heavily involved in showing the small child how to do things rather than just doing things for them; it is usual for the toddler to mimic the parents. Toddlers need help to build their vocabulary, increase their communication skills, and manage their emotions. Toddlers will also begin to understand social etiquette such as being polite and taking turns.
Toddlers are very curious about the world around them and eager to explore it. They seek greater independence and responsibility and may become frustrated when things do not go the way they want or expect. Tantrums begin at this stage, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘Terrible Twos’. Tantrums are often caused by the child’s frustration over the particular situation, sometimes simply not being able to communicate properly. Parents of toddlers are expected to help guide and teach the child, establish basic routines (such as washing
hands before meals or brushing teeth before bed), and increase the child’s responsibilities. It is also normal for toddlers to be frequently frustrated. It is an essential step to their development. They will learn through experience; trial and error. This means that they need to experience being frustrated when something does not work for them, in order to move on to the next stage. When the toddler is frustrated, they will often behave badly with actions like screaming, hitting or biting. Parents need to be careful when reacting to such behaviors, giving threats or punishments is not helpful and will only make the situation worse. Research groups led by Daniel Schechter, Alytia Levendosky, and others have shown that parents with histories of maltreatment and violence exposure often have difficulty helping their toddlers and preschool-age children with these very same emotionally dysregulated behaviors, which can remind traumatized parents of their adverse experiences and associated mental states.
Regarding gender differences in parenting, data from the US in 2014 states that, on an average day, among adults living in households with children under age 6, women spent 1.0 hour providing physical care (such as bathing or feeding a child) to household children. By contrast, men spent 23 minutes providing physical care.
Younger children are becoming more independent and are beginning to build friendships. They are able to reason and can make their own decisions given hypothetical situations. Young children demand constant attention, but will learn how to deal with boredom and be able to play independently. They also enjoy helping and feeling useful and able. Parents may assist their child by encouraging social interactions and modelling proper social behaviors. A large part of learning in the early years comes from being involved in activities and household duties. Parents who observe their children in play or join with them in child-driven play have the opportunity to glimpse into their children’s world, learn to communicate more effectively with their children and are given another setting to offer gentle, nurturing guidance. Parents are also teaching their children health, hygiene, and eating habits through instruction and by example.
Parents are expected to make decisions about their child’s education. Parenting styles in this area diverge greatly at this stage with some parents becoming heavily involved in arranging organized activities and early learning programs. Other parents choose to let the child develop with few organized activities.
Children begin to learn responsibility, and consequences of their actions, with parental assistance. Some parents provide a small allowance that increases with age to help teach children the value of money and how to be responsible with it.
Parents who are consistent and fair with their discipline, who openly communicate and offer explanations to their children, and who do not neglect the needs of their children in some way often find they have fewer problems with their children as they mature.
Main article: Adolescence
Parents often feel isolated and alone in parenting adolescents. Adolescence can be a time of high risk for children, where new-found freedoms can result in decisions that drastically open up or close off life opportunities. There are also large changes occurring in the brain during adolescence; the emotional center of the brain is now fully developed but the rational frontal cortex hasn’t matured yet to keep all of those emotions in check. Adolescents tend to increase the amount of time they spend with peers of the opposite gender; however, they still maintain the amount of time they spend with those of the same gender–and they do this by decreasing the amount of time they spend with their parents.
Although adolescents look to peers and adults outside the family for guidance and models for how to behave, parents remain influential in their development. Studies show that parents have a significant impact, for instance, on how much teens drink.
During adolescence children are beginning to form their identity and are testing and developing the interpersonal and occupational roles that they will assume as adults. Therefore, it is important that parents treat them as young adults. Parental issues at this stage of parenting include dealing with “rebellious” teenagers who consistently push the limits. In order to prevent these issues, it is important for the parents to build a trusting relationship with their children. This can be achieved by planning and taking part in fun activities together, keeping promises made to the children, spending time with them, not reminding kids about their past mistakes and listening to and talking to them.
When a trusting relationship is built up, adolescents are more likely to approach their parents for help when faced with negative peer pressure. Helping the children build a strong foundation will help them resist negative peer pressure.
Parenting does not usually end when a child turns 18. Support may be needed in a child’s life well beyond the adolescent years and continues into middle and later adulthood. Parenting can be a lifelong process.
Parents may provide financial support to their adult children, which can also include providing an inheritance after death. The life perspective and wisdom given by a parent can benefit their adult children in their own lives. Becoming a grandparent is another milestone and has many similarities with parenting.
Roles can be reversed in some ways when adult children become caregivers to their elderly parents.
Main article: Child care
Parents may receive assistance with caring for their children through child care programs.
Childbearing and happiness
Data from the British Household Panel Survey and the German Socio-Economic Panel suggests that having up to two children increases happiness in the years around the birth, and mostly so for those who have postponed childbearing. However, having a third child does not increase happiness.
Adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


I. European Colonization through 1900
The notion of Mississippi as an especially southern place did not occur to Native Americans or early European explorers and settlers—and certainly not in the ways and for the reasons that later definitions of the South were created. The place we call Mississippi was colony and frontier well before it was a state with a widely shared sense of its history, traditions, and image. The land was the home of thousands of Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, Tunica, Biloxi, and Pascagoula, all with their own cultures, foundational narratives, and sense of the land and their place in it.
Early descriptions of Mississippi resemble those found in explorers’ narratives of other areas of what became known as the Gulf South. Spanish and French explorers commonly marveled at the land’s bounty and beauty, viewing the South as a new Eden ripe to fall into their hands. At the same time, and often in the same accounts, Europeans painted the land as a savage and uncivilized place, teeming with dangerous Indians. Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led an expedition through the Southeast that spent the winter of 1540–41 in Mississippi. Journals kept by members of the expedition show that the explorers were fascinated by the native peoples and by the native flora and fauna. The journals also record Spanish misunderstanding and abuse of the Indians, leading to what would become a familiar pattern of violence and retaliation. Over time, Mississippians’ stories about the state’s original inhabitants became consistent with larger heroic American narratives of discovery, exploration, conquest, and settlement.
More than one hundred years passed between the de Soto expedition and the establishment of the first permanent European settlement in Mississippi. Between 1699 and 1702 French explorers (and brothers) Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, and Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, established bases on Cat Island and near what are now Ocean Springs and Biloxi. From that point through the end of the eighteenth century, stories and representations of Mississippi fit within broader tales of the struggle between the British and the French and their Native American allies for hegemony in North America. Following the construction of Fort Rosalie on the Natchez Bluffs in 1716, the Natchez District and the Mississippi River became rich producers of Mississippi images and myths. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Natchez developed a reputation, still celebrated, as a rough and cutthroat gambling den, with coarse men from Mississippi riverboats drawn to the city’s Under-the-Hill port district. Myth and legend also grew surrounding the Natchez Trace, which connected the city with Nashville, Tennessee, especially the road’s robber gangs such as the Masons and Harpes.
Before Mississippi became a southern state, it was the southwestern frontier of the United States. The new country asserted a claim to Mississippi in 1783, but the land remained essentially in Spanish hands until the end of the century, when it became a US territory before achieving statehood in 1817. By the 1830s the state’s population, both free and enslaved, boomed as part of the southwestern Cotton Kingdom. In Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), Joseph G. Baldwin memorably described the state’s raw conditions, social and economic fluidity, and boom-and-bust mentality. Mississippi in the early decades of the nineteenth century is just as accurately described as the West as it is the South. Like many other Americans in states such as South Carolina and Tennessee that later seemed quite southern, Mississippians in this period were ardent nationalists who embraced the expanding Union and saw its values as their own.
Some of the most persistent narratives and representations of Mississippi stem from the state’s experience with slavery, Confederate defeat in the Civil War, and struggles during Reconstruction. As in other Deep South states, Mississippi’s economy and broader culture became deeply invested in the production of cotton using slave labor. That is not to say that most Mississippians owned slaves or became wealthy cotton barons. The state’s surviving antebellum mansions, particularly those in Natchez, are singularly unrepresentative. Most white Mississippians lived under much more modest, frontier-like conditions. Further, the Delta, the area of the state most typically associated with cotton production, did not come under broad cultivation until the late nineteenth century. Whatever the average white Mississippian’s economic relationship to the South’s peculiar institution, the white population in the decades before the Civil War largely viewed slavery as a positive good and almost universally supported white supremacy as a doctrine and political program. The state’s African American population, of course, rejected these ideas and constructed beliefs and practices that told a much different story of their aspirations and sense of how the world should be. Nevertheless, the white population’s defense of slavery and white supremacy demanded and created myths and narratives that continue to influence the state and its people to the present day.
Most white Mississippians became ardent defenders of slavery after the 1830s, when federal treaties opened the northern two-thirds of the state to white settlement. In this period, Mississippi’s black population rose dramatically, and white Mississippians, slave owners or not, largely came to believe that control of the enslaved population constituted a vital state interest. From the 1830s through the coming of the Civil War, white Mississippians, like other southerners, grew increasingly sensitive to northern and international criticism of the region’s manners and institutions.
Mississippi had a vigorously competitive two-party system into the 1850s, but the polarization caused by the politics of slavery fractured the Mississippi Whigs so completely that for many generations the memory of an antebellum two-party system disappeared beneath exhortations that all white Mississippians had always shared the same basic political faith. The state cast its lot with the Confederacy, experienced what whites perceived as a galling and inexplicable defeat, and by the end of the century joined the rest of the white South in remembering the experience as a tragic Lost Cause. Such myths were not without foundation. Battle and disease killed thousands of Mississippians; thousands more returned maimed. Memories of civilian hardship in cities burned or besieged by Union forces lingered well into the twentieth century. Particularly with Jefferson Davis’s postwar residence at Beauvoir on the Gulf Coast, many Mississippians came to believe that they had a special responsibility for ensuring that the Confederate experience was piously remembered. Conversely, Black Mississippians regarded Confederate defeat as the deliverance for which they had long hoped.
In the wake of the war, black Mississippians aspired to economic advancement and the enjoyment of basic civil rights. White Mississippians rejected these aspirations, and the state soon became nationally known for its commitment to racial segregation and white supremacy. White recollections of Reconstruction and its meaning became one of the state’s most fundamental and orthodox tenets. For more than a century after the Civil War, one of the most enduring Mississippi narratives was that of Reconstruction as a carnival of vice and folly. This impression of Reconstruction animated generations of white Mississippians and seemed to offer self-evident proof that black Mississippians had no capacity for self-government. At the same time, the vociferousness with which the state’s newspapers, textbooks, and politicians denounced Reconstruction persuaded many black Mississippians that most whites would never accept African American political participation. During the late nineteenth century, white Mississippians searched for the meaning of Confederate defeat and how to make sense of that legacy as well as the recent and frightening insistence by black Mississippians that they deserved the same constitutional rights and economic opportunities as did whites.
Following Reconstruction certain stories became staples of white belief: the Civil War was a response to northern interference and invasion; during the war, the loyalty and docility of slaves offered touching evidence of the essential benignity of the institution; Reconstruction was a misguided festival of corruption that forever proved the folly of black political participation; a group of valiant white Democrats, the Redeemers, restored democracy and offered the only safe political leadership for the state; and finally, both races found segregation the best way to handle race relations. At the same time, both native whites and many outsiders wished to see in Mississippi some of the remnants of a way of life that elsewhere was gone with the wind. These accounts stressed the courtly manners and hospitality of the state’s residents and commonly presented slaveholding as admirable and enviable. Mississippi suffragist Belle Kearney’s memoir, A Slaveholder’s Daughter (1900), neatly summarizes what became a widely held if exaggerated view of a “very rich and very proud” Old South: “Its wealth consisted of slaves and plantations. Its pride was masterful from a consciousness of power. The customs of society retained the color of older European civilization, although the affairs of state were conducted according to the ideals of a radical democracy. Its social structure was simple, homogeneous.” By the end of the nineteenth century, dominant voices in Mississippi society proclaimed that the state’s white population stood as one in honoring the sacrifices of the Confederate generation and safeguarding the Jim Crow society that now seemed central to the Mississippi Way of Life.
II. Since 1900
Especially since the end of the nineteenth century and for good or for ill, the state of Mississippi has been viewed as particularly and intensely southern. The state’s name conjures up a variety of intense images: stately Natchez homes, Delta plantations, cotton fields, and magnolias; demagogic politics, racism, poverty, hardship, and want; anti-intellectualism alongside stunning achievements in creative writing and music; searing images of violent resistance to social change along with an intense concern with manners, hospitality, and courtesy. For much of the twentieth century many other Americans and not a few Mississippians and former Mississippians viewed the state as backward if not actually evil. “Everybody knows about Mississippi,” sang Nina Simone in 1963, the same year that Bob Dylan declared that he wasn’t “a-goin’ down to Oxford town.” More than most other states, Mississippi has generated sharp and often dissonant narratives and myths: the land where a blues musician might offer his soul to the devil at a crossroads, the most southern place on earth, the worst state in America to be black, a land the ambitious leave, a place that offers a warm Magnolia State welcome and grace and sense of place, a land of slow-paced down-home living and traditional values—and more recently a place attempting to preserve the best of its customs and culture while coming to terms with and perhaps overcoming the tragic and painful legacies of its past.
Many iconic images and impressions of Mississippi seem indistinguishable from broader southern myths and narratives: sharp and lingering memories of the Civil War as a tragic Lost Cause; front-porch hospitality, storytelling, and iconic southern foods such as fried chicken, iced tea, greens, and a variety of dishes involving pork and corn; an enthusiasm for sports, particularly football, amounting practically to a civil religion; evangelical Christianity, religious revivals, and river baptisms; mules, cotton fields, country stores, a love of the outdoors and the traditions of fishing and hunting, especially such landmarks as the opening day of deer season, and a pattern of life still influenced by rural and agricultural ways; and a lingering respect for traditionally defined roles for men and women, manifesting themselves in ways such as a veneration of military service for men and a respect for beauty pageants.
Scholars have long argued that whatever it means to be southern, Mississippi is it. Historian Dunbar Rowland’s admiring Mississippi: The Heart of the South (1925) represented what was by the twentieth century a common view of the state. John Shelton Reed often points out that almost any definition of the South today begins with Mississippi and Alabama and moves out. Fred Hobson has written that “Mississippi is the guts of the beast, the stomach with a Bible Belt wrapped around it. . . . Mississippi . . . is visceral.” Indeed, some have argued that Mississippi images have overly influenced people’s impressions of the larger South: Paul Conkin notes that in talking about the South, some people really mean “a South largely defined by Alabama and Mississippi . . . or even the area around Oxford, Mississippi.”
As with any stock of myths and narratives, many of those generated by Mississippians are quite self-conscious and serve a variety of ends. Certainly since the late 1800s Mississippians have engaged in very deliberate acts of memorialization and assertions of identity. Obvious examples would include the Confederate monuments that stand in front of many of the state’s courthouses, joined later in the twentieth century by memorials to those who died in later wars. Many Mississippians not only deeply prize kinship and family ties but also avidly trace their genealogy at local and state historical societies and more recently via the Internet. Because of their interest in tradition, custom, and history, Mississippians are sometimes accused of living in the past. But Mississippians’ interest in the past and the way that it is remembered have always been very closely tied to arguments about the present and its values, whether the issue is the design of the state flag or the erection of memorials to heroes of the civil rights movement. As with many traditions, Mississippi’s are often of relatively recent vintage, beginning with the commonly held idea that Mississippi’s customs, institutions, and general way of life have always existed in what is basically their present form. Like all people’s myths and narratives of identity, those generated by Mississippians explain to themselves and others their views of the world and how it works.
White Mississippians have generated most of the memorials, textual or otherwise, that laud the state’s virtues. Black Mississippians have understandably been less praiseful of a place that long denied them basic civil rights, decency, and respect. For example, Richard Wright’s novels and autobiographical writings and Anne Moody’s memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) demonstrate that neither time nor distance could provoke nostalgia for the place they were born. James Meredith, on the other hand, expressed the complex mixed feelings that many other black Mississippians have held as he described coming home: “There is the feeling of joy . . . to enter the land of my fathers, the land of my birth, the only land in which I feel at home. . . . There is a feeling of sadness . . . because I am immediately aware of the special subhuman role that I must play, because I am a Negro, or die. [And] I feel love because I have always felt that Mississippi belonged to me and one must love what is his.” Since the mid-twentieth century Mississippians have produced a flood of memoirs and fictional works about their home state. While residents’ experiences of race vary widely, of course, one notable feature of these narratives is that they show that Mississippians of all races, especially in rural areas, praised and valued and experienced many things in common—an attraction to the land, attention to agricultural rhythms, and church, family, and kinship ties. These factors and many others provided a texture to everyday life that was more alike than most Mississippians recognized.
Myths and representations of Mississippi have long followed a broader national pattern of viewing the South in conflicting and sometimes irreconcilable ways. Are the state and the region the last refuge of a religious sensibility or of a broader way of life uncorrupted by twentieth-century materialism and consumerism? Is Mississippi somehow a cultural and social backwater, a place that has failed to evolve and progress? Or is the state perhaps the nation’s pathological abyss in which one can view cracked and warped perversions of American dreams and aspirations? As with any symbols or cultural practices, those created by and about Mississippians are open to multiple interpretations. One example might be the powerful if sometimes frustratingly amorphous confection of manners and etiquette noticed by Mississippians and other Americans alike. These manners, such as respect for one’s elders and regard for kin and neighbors, have often drawn favorable comment, while other practices, such as Jim Crow racial etiquette, stultifying gender roles, and an emphasis on hierarchy and rank, have been central to a much less flattering image of southern culture. This Janus-faced presentation, or duality, one might call it, was observed by Bernard Lafayette, a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a 1960s civil rights organization, as he recollected his first visit to the state: “The first sign I saw was a huge billboard that said, ‘Welcome to Mississippi, the Magnolia State,’ and a beautiful white magnolia blossom. . . . [T]he next sign I saw said, ‘Prepare to Meet Thy God.’”
While white Mississippians have long winced at one-dimensional representations of the state, other Americans and many black Mississippians have unquestionably associated the state with a fundamental racial consciousness and commitment to white supremacy that by the 1960s seemed anachronistic compared even to other states of the Deep South. Civil rights worker Robert Moses said that Mississippi in 1964 was “a little apartheid.” The state’s name, then, long served as shorthand for racial discrimination. Perhaps understandably, many Mississippians have resented the broad strokes in which the state has been painted, insisting that there is more to Mississippi than racial discrimination. Many of these Mississippians praise themselves for their devotion to family, church, and community. In their eyes, the state has held firm to values, manners, and practices of which the rest of the nation has lost sight. Like many Mississippi self-images, devotion to these practices can be seen as a negative as well as a positive. To outsiders, the state can feel clannish and exclusive in its definition of community and hostile to those who challenge or simply do not share the majority’s adherence to conservative values and evangelical Christianity. One finds this sense of Mississippi as essentially one homogeneous community in the Works Progress Administration’s Guide to Mississippi (1938), which described the state as “the great neighborhood called Mississippi, a neighborhood where the birthright of knowing the drive of the plow in the puissant earth binds the sections more closely than geographical boundaries, a neighborhood of earth-rooted individuals who know and understand one another.”
The state and its customs, particularly Jim Crow and the politics associated with racial segregation, attracted the attention of social scientists in the 1930s and 1940s. John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), a study of “Southerntown” (actually Indianola) and Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939), another study of Indianola, helped circulate the image of Mississippi as race-obsessed and caste-ridden. Other critics were more vociferous if less scholarly. H. L. Mencken, while a fan of the values that he believed the Old South to embody, enjoyed tweaking Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s, consistently terming it the most “barbaric” state in the Union. Most white Mississippians dismissed this criticism, while some, such as David Cohn, in Where I Was Born and Raised (1948), and William Alexander Percy, in Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941), attempted to explain the state and its customs to a national audience.
Business and progressive interests in Mississippi have long been sensitive to the stereotypes that other Americans hold about the state. Campaigns in the 1930s such as Gov. Hugh White’s Balance Agriculture with Industry aimed to convince investors that the state’s folkways could accommodate the development of business. By the 1950s and 1960s many white Mississippians certainly knew that in the eyes of other Americans, the state conjured up images not only of violent resistance to civil rights but also of the rejection of broader American myths of equality, opportunity, and progress. As newspapers and television began covering the civil rights movement in Mississippi and the rest of the South, black and white Mississippians were well aware of the light that the media threw on their state and its customs. Many white Mississippians maintained that the civil rights movement was the product of outside agitators—a way of preserving their belief that black Mississippians were largely content with the Mississippi Way of Life. White Mississippians also commonly declared that Yankees unfairly maligned and picked on the state, failing to see their own prejudices and provincialisms. Some Mississippians’ automobiles displayed license plates declaring that Mississippi was “The Most Lied about State in the Union.” The state song, “Go, Mississippi,” adopted by the legislature in 1962, clearly responds to official white Mississippi’s impressions of outside criticism: the state is “on the right track,” “cannot go wrong”; “ev’rything’s fine,” and the state is “leading the show.” At the time the song was adopted, only the last assertion seemed indisputable—and not necessarily in a positive way.
Mississippi has always produced its own dissenters and critics. In the 1960s, however, dissent less often produced progressive change than excited popular denunciation that merely confirmed many existing conceptions regarding the state. In the wake of what he perceived as the failure of the state’s political leadership during the integration of the University of Mississippi, history professor James W. Silver wrote Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964). For that, Silver was hounded from the state. Hodding Carter’s So the Heffners Left McComb (1965) seemed to most readers not the story of one family’s attempt to understand the social change in their community but rather a familiar tale of Mississippi intolerance. Other critical voices held out hope not only that Mississippi might accept social change but also that the state might have lessons to teach the rest of the nation.
Mississippi’s musical and literary traditions have provided powerful and not always flattering representations of the state to the nation and the world. Blues lyrics, to take one example, provide a powerful testimony of the meaning of Mississippi to many of its black citizens. Similarly, for much of the twentieth century, the state’s writers commonly took as their material Mississippi’s struggles with race and poverty and the weight of the past on the present. To many readers, Yoknapatawpha County is Mississippi, with Thomas Sutpen, Quentin Compson, and Joe Christmas all representing something true about the state’s encounter with history. Most white Mississippians scorned William Faulkner and other Mississippi writers such as Richard Wright during their most productive years for their critical representations of the state. For several decades, Willie Morris made a career of reflecting on the state’s recent past and his feelings about it. From his father’s admonition to leave the state for the better educational opportunities that Texas provided to his encounter with Robert Frost during which he said that Mississippi was the worst state in the Union, Morris relished examining and discussing the history of his family and state.
Artists from outside the state also helped to fashion myths and representations of Mississippi. Bob Dylan’s “Oxford Town” casts a familiar image of white Mississippians as violent, prejudiced, and essentially un-American. On the other hand, Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mississippi, You’re on My Mind” reminds us that not all representations of Mississippi center on race. That song presents the state’s hold on the narrator via a procession of familiar images: barbed wire fences, honeysuckle, tar paper shacks, John Deere tractors, lazy dogs, and oven-like heat. Along with press and television coverage of the state, Hollywood has created and perpetuated lasting images of Mississippi. As with many other movie representations of the South, those of Mississippi tended to fall into one of two broad categories: comic, sassy, colorful, and favorable, such as Crimes of the Heart (1986), or coarse, crude, racist, and unregenerate, such as In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Mississippi Burning (1988), which is also notable for its condescending view of black Mississippians as powerless but prayerful.
In recent years many Mississippians have hoped that the state can escape, atone for, or simply stop thinking and talking about its history of racial prejudice and discrimination. In some accounts, the state has arrived at a sort of promised land beyond racism, and if Mississippi is not yet a beloved community of racial harmony, it is at least a workable and useful model of honest attempts at racial reconciliation and a day-to-day ability to live and work together. Attempts to carry myths and representations of Mississippi beyond stories of black-white conflict surely are not without merit. Characterizations of the state’s population and history as Anglo-Saxon versus African American do not take into account the plain fact that the state has always been home to a variety of people with stories about themselves and their history that sometimes stand as counternarratives to and at other times weave easily into familiar Mississippi stories. Broader, more inclusive, and perhaps more workable narratives of Mississippi might include the long-standing communities of Chinese and Italians in the Delta, Choctaw Indians in eastern Mississippi, Southern and Eastern Europeans and Vietnamese on the Gulf Coast, and an increasing number of Spanish-speaking residents.
Recent years have seen a great deal of good-faith effort to craft narratives and representations of Mississippi that are race-neutral if not colorblind. The state’s media, universities, and most public forums honor Mississippi’s writers, musicians, and other public figures through the lens of race. Mississippians have begun incorporating the civil rights movement into the stories they tell about who they are. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History’s State Historical Marker program has commemorated more than eight hundred significant people, places, and events, a large number of which focus on black Mississippians’ experiences and history. The state’s Department of Travel and Tourism, to take another example, offers resources for those interested in visiting sites related to Mississippi’s African American history, including frank discussions of the civil rights movement that would have been unthinkable in a state publication a generation or two ago.
One of the clearest ongoing arguments over narratives and representations of the state is the extent to which past racial inequities deserve public attention and remediation. Perhaps the best reason not to declare a moratorium on the discussion of race in the state in that for most of Mississippi’s history, the conversation was very much one-sided. Black Mississippians long formed their own judgments regarding the state and its promise. Until recently, however, those views were largely confined within the black community, as the danger of expressing discontent with the status quo outweighed the likelihood of effecting change. The Great Migration is itself a testimony to many black Mississippians’ view of the state as an unpromising land, but census figures have begun to show an African American return migration to the state, itself a commentary on the state’s image. African Americans’ narratives of Mississippi have recently displayed an increasing desire to claim the state as their own and on their own terms. W. Ralph Eubanks’s Ever Is a Long Time (2003) describes the author’s attempts to learn about the history of the state during the 1960s, a story his parents shielded from him as he grew up during those years. Clifton L. Taulbert’s Once upon a Time When We Were Colored (1989) tells a story of warmth, community, and identity during the Jim Crow years and is not far removed from other celebrations of growing up in rural Mississippi. Musician Afroman’s “Mississippi” brags of his sexual exploits but also expresses pleasant surprise that he attracts white fans, possibly because of their shared love for marijuana. And rapper David Banner’s “Mississippi” is the state “where yo grandmamma from” and invites the listener, “Now come on home get you somethin’ to eat.” Conversely, he also describes the state as a place “where a flag means more than me.”
The state flag controversy is an indication that Mississippi still struggles to craft inclusive narratives of community and identity. On one level, of course, many white Mississippians see the argument as a referendum not so much on a particular flag as on whether they accept the version of the state’s history that other people insist that the flag represents. Symbols such as the state flag are highly meaningful within and across various communities of Mississippians, even if those meanings are highly contested. Mississippians argue about the meaning of flags, statues, college mascots, and street names, and those arguments are often so heated because these symbols do not have absolute meanings.
Many Mississippians recognize that the state continues to have an image problem. While some merely resent what they consider an inaccurate and exaggerated stereotype, others make efforts to correct it. Indeed, a state advertising agency’s public relations campaign, “Mississippi . . . Believe It!,” promotes the state’s achievements in the arts, sports, science, and technology.
Mississippians continue actively to craft representations of and stories about the state. Many have learned that money can be made in marketing the state as a provider of culture, especially literature, music, and history. Where the state once had a reputation for shunning outsiders, Mississippians now avidly seek patrons to gamble in casinos and to make movies in picturesque small towns. Every year, the calendar is filled with festivals, homecomings, and reunions, drawing on and promoting an image of the state as family and kin. Tourists and native Mississippians come to century-old events such as the Neshoba County Fair and to decades-old celebrations such as the Natchez Pilgrimage as well as to events of more recent vintage, such as the Medgar Evers Homecoming Celebration, the Mississippi Delta Blues and Heritage Festival, or the Oxford Conference for the Book. Mississippians have discovered that culture is a commodity that can be marketed to burnish the state’s image to investors as well as cultural arbiters. Even authenticity can be marketed or even created. Today, tourists come to Mississippi to find the “real South,” and entrepreneurs and local people have learned to supply it.
Unflattering representations of Mississippi continue to appear in the media, as the state consistently ranks near the top (or bottom, as the case may be) in national rankings of obesity, teenage pregnancy, and venereal disease. Unfairly or not, to many other Americans, the state’s name still conjures up images of the 1962 riot in Oxford or the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner in Neshoba County. A younger generation of Americans became familiar with that image of the state from Eyes on the Prize, a history of the civil rights movement televised on PBS in 1987. Many Mississippians complain that the rest of the country and the world view the state wrongly, that the Mythic Mississippi that Hollywood, the media, and many academics see is harsh and distorted and bears little resemblance to the state today. However, the state’s past does not change simply because current conditions have changed. Myths and representations are often tenacious and are famously oblivious to fact and reason. So Mississippians continue to tell about themselves and their culture. Whenever the national spotlight shines on the state, many residents attempt to show the rest of the country a New Mississippi, one in which the real story is the state’s “racial evolution” and not its “murderous past,” as an Associated Press story on the 2008 presidential debate in Oxford put it. However they wish its story to be told, those who call Mississippi home can broadly agree with Faulkner’s reflection on the state: “You don’t love because; you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.”
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Dorothy Abbott, ed., Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth, vol. 1, Fiction (1985); Charles Angoff and H. L. Mencken, The American Mercury (September, October, and November 1931); Joseph G. Baldwin, Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853); Marion Barnwell, ed., A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives (1997); Bradley G. Bond, ed., Mississippi: A Documentary History (2003); Paul Conkin, Journal of Southern History (February 1998); Hodding Carter, So the Heffners Left McComb (1965); David Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised (1948); Paul Conkin, Journal of Southern History (February 1998); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937); W. Ralph Eubanks, Ever Is a Long Time (2003); Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State (1938); Fred Hobson, Southern Cultures (Spring 2000); Bernard Lafayette, in Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing (2008); Belle Kearney, A Slaveholder’s Daughter (1900); James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis, eds., Mississippi: Conflict and Change (1974); James Meredith with William Doyle, A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America (2012); Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968); William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941); Willie Morris, North toward Home (1967); Willie Morris, Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home (1981); Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939); John Shelton Reed, My Tears Spoiled My Aim and Other Reflections on Southern Culture, 1993; Dunbar Rowland, Mississippi: The Heart of the South (1925); James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964); Clifton L. Taulbert, Once upon a Time When We Were Colored (1989); Richard Wright, Black Boy (1946); Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938).
- Dorothy Abbott, ed., Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth, vol. 1, Fiction (1985)
- Charles Angoff and H. L. Mencken, The American Mercury (September, October, and November 1931)
- Joseph G. Baldwin, Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853); Marion Barnwell, ed., A Place Called Mississippi: Collected Narratives (1997)
- Bradley G. Bond, ed., Mississippi: A Documentary History (2003)
- Paul Conkin, Journal of Southern History (February 1998)
- Hodding Carter, So the Heffners Left McComb (1965)
- David Cohn, Where I Was Born and Raised (1948)
- Paul Conkin, Journal of Southern History (February 1998)
- John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937)
- W. Ralph Eubanks, Ever Is a Long Time (2003)
- Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, Mississippi: The WPA Guide to the Magnolia State (1938)
- Fred Hobson, Southern Cultures (Spring 2000)
- Bernard Lafayette, in Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing (2008)
- Belle Kearney, A Slaveholder’s Daughter (1900)
- James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis, eds., Mississippi: Conflict and Change (1974)
- James Meredith with William Doyle, A Mission from God: A Memoir and Challenge for America (2012)
- Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)
- William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941)
- Willie Morris, North toward Home (1967)
- Willie Morris, Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home (1981)
- Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939)
- John Shelton Reed, My Tears Spoiled My Aim and Other Reflections on Southern Culture, 1993
- Dunbar Rowland, Mississippi: The Heart of the South (1925)
- James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964)
- Clifton L. Taulbert, Once upon a Time When We Were Colored (1989)
- Richard Wright, Black Boy (1946)
- Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)