Mississippi Home Places

Notes on literature and history.

The Pelican Guide to Old Homes of Mississippi Volume II: Columbus and the North features the following areas: Macon, Columbus, Starkville, Aberdeen, Corinth, Holly Springs, Oxford, Sardis, Como, Carrollton, Grenada, and the Greenville Delta. This volume includes all the essential information that will make the area a sightseer's delight: photographs of famous homes and landmarks, locations, hours open, significant features, notable history, and admission policies. Author Helen Kerr Kempe is a former associate editor of the Louisiana Almanac. She has also written The Pelican Guide to Old Homes of Mississippi Volume I Natchez and the South. Her Mississippi guides are significant contributions to the Pelican Guide Series.

As Eudora Welty observed, "One place understood helps us know all places better." Nowhere is this more apropos than in her home state of Mississippi. Although accounts of its architecture have long conjured visions of white-columned antebellum mansions, its towns, buildings, and landscapes are ultimately far more complex, engaging, and challenging. This guidebook surveys a range of such locations, from Native American mounds and villages to plantation outbuildings that bear witness to the lives of enslaved African Americans, from twentieth-century enclaves built for sawmill workers and oil tycoons to neighborhoods that bolstered black Mississippians during segregation, and from the vernacular streetscapes of small towns to modern architecture in Greenville, Meridian, Jackson, and Biloxi. In the pages of this latest volume in the celebrated Buildings of the United States series, newly redesigned in a more user-friendly format, readers will come to know the history of close to 600 sites, illustrated by 250 photographs (most in full color) and 29 maps, including such wide-ranging places as Longwood and the Museum of African American History and Culture in Natchez, Vicksburg National Military Park, Winterville Mounds, the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, the Neshoba County Jail and Courthouse, the University of Mississippi and William Faulkner's Rowan Oak in Oxford, and the homes of Medgar and Myrlie Evers and Eudora Welty in Jackson. A volume in the Buildings of the United States series of the Society of Architectural Historians

This fifty-site tour through the Magnolia State's historic locales traces the region's history across several centuries and explores how each contributes a unique piece of the state's rich and multilayered story.

This book presents the manner in which builders adapted to the whimsy of a river and the tides of technological, social, and political change while preserving the beauty and grandeur for which the South is known.

Mississippi Off the Beaten Path features the things travelers and locals want to see and experience––if only they knew about them. From the best in local dining to quirky cultural tidbits to hidden attractions, unique finds, and unusual locales, Mississippi Off the Beaten Path takes the reader down the road less traveled and reveals a side of Mississippi that other guidebooks just don't offer.

Places that Matter asks the reader to identify a place that matters in their life—their home, a place of worship, a park, or some other site that acts as an emotional and physical anchor and connects them to a neighborhood. Then readers are asked: In what ways do I currently support—or fail to support—that neighborhood? Should support be increased? If so, in what ways? Joan Ferrante guides students through a learning experience that engages qualitative and quantitative research and culminates in writing a meaningful plan of action or research brief. Students are introduced to basic concepts of research and are exposed to the experiences of gathering and drawing on data related to something immediate and personal. The class-tested exercises are perfect for courses that emphasize action-based research and social responsibility. The book’s overarching goal is to help students assess their neighborhood’s needs and strengths and then create a concrete plan that supports that neighborhood and promotes its prosperity. Accompanying the book is a facilitator’s companion website to guide action-based research experiences, which includes rubrics that are aligned to common learning objectives and are also designed to make tracking and reporting easier.

In this collection, essayists examine their lives, their memories of Mississippi, the reasons they left the state, and what drew them back. They talk about how life differs and wears on you in the far-flung parts of our nation, and the qualities that make Mississippi unique. The writers from all corners of the state are as diverse as the regions from which they come. They are of different races, different life experiences, different talents, and different temperaments. Yet in acceding to the magical lure of Mississippi they are in many ways alike. Their roots are deep in the rich soil of this state, and they come from strong families that valued education and promoted an indomitable optimism. Successes stem from a passion, usually emerging early in life, that burns within them. But that passion is tempered, disciplined, encouraged, and influenced by the people around them, as well as the landscape and the history of their times. These essays give us a glimpse of the people and places that nurtured the young lives of the essayists and offered the values that directed them as they sought their dreams elsewhere. Often they found that opportunity was within their grasp in their home state and came back to realize their full potential. They came back, in some cases, to retire to a familiar place of pleasant memories, to family and to friends. They all have a love and respect for Mississippi and continue, back home, to use their talents to help make the state an even better place to live.