Old Times on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain. It was published in 1876. A serialized version of the work first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine published in 1875. It was later incorporated into his 1883 work, Life on the Mississippi .
James Charles Evers was an American civil rights activist, businessman, radio personality, and politician. Evers was known for his role in the civil rights movement along with his younger brother Medgar Evers. After serving in World War II, Evers began his career as a disc jockey at WHOC in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In 1954, he was made the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) State Voter Registration chairman. After his brother's assassination in 1963, Evers took over his position as field director of the NAACP in Mississippi. In this role, he organized and led many demonstrations for the rights of African Americans.
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Walker Percy, OSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
John Ray Grisham Jr. is an American novelist, lawyer and former member of the 7th district of the Mississippi House of Representatives, known for his popular legal thrillers. According to the American Academy of Achievement, Grisham has written 28 consecutive number-one fiction bestsellers, and his books have sold 300 million copies worldwide. Along with Tom Clancy and J. K. Rowling, Grisham is one of only three authors to have sold two million copies on the first printing.
The University of Mississippi is a public research university that is located adjacent to Oxford, Mississippi, and has a medical center in Jackson. It is Mississippi's oldest public university and its largest by enrollment.
Eudora Alice Welty was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the "Great American Novel". Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.
Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist and the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, who was murdered by Byron De La Beckwith. Evers, a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran who had served in World War II, was engaged in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans including the enforcement of voting rights.
Mississippi State University for Agriculture and Applied Science, commonly known as Mississippi State University (MSU), is a public land-grant research university adjacent to Starkville, Mississippi. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity" and has a total research and development budget of $239.4 million, the largest in Mississippi.
Stark Young was an American teacher, playwright, novelist, painter, literary critic, translator, and essayist.
Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
Greil Marcus is an American author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is notable for producing scholarly and literary essays that place rock music in a broader framework of culture and politics.
Shelby Dade Foote Jr. was an American writer, historian and journalist. Although he primarily viewed himself as a novelist, he is now best known for his authorship of The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the American Civil War.
Donna Louise Tartt is an American novelist and essayist. Her work has been widely critically-acclaimed, and her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been adapted into a film.
The Press-Register was a newspaper serving the southwest Alabama counties of Mobile and Baldwin. The newspaper is a descendant of one founded in 1813, making the Press-Register Alabama's oldest newspaper. It is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns the primary newspapers in Birmingham, Alabama and Huntsville, Alabama. The Press-Register had a daily publication schedule since the inception of its predecessors in the early 1800s until September 30, 2012, at which time it and its sister papers reduced to print editions only on Wednesday, Fridays and Sundays.
Clyde Kennard was an American Korean War veteran and civil rights leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. In the 1950s, he attempted several times to enroll at the all-white Mississippi Southern College to complete his undergraduate degree started at the University of Chicago. Although the United States Supreme Court had ruled in 1954 that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, the college rejected him. Kennard was among the thousands of local activists in the 1940s and 1950s who pressed for their rights.
William Turner Catledge was an American journalist, best known for his work at The New York Times. He was managing editor from 1952 to 1964, when he became the paper's first executive editor.
Unita Zelma Blackwell was an American civil rights activist who was the first African-American woman to be elected mayor in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Blackwell was a project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and helped organize voter drives for African Americans across Mississippi. She was also a founder of the US–China Peoples Friendship Association, a group dedicated to promoting cultural exchange between the United States and China. She also served as an advisor to six US presidents: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton.
The Turk Site (15CE6) is a Mississippian culture archaeological site located near Bardwell in Carlisle County, Kentucky, on a bluff spur overlooking the Mississippi River floodplain.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland was an American scholar, playwright, and civil rights activist.