The lower Mississippi valley, as a distinct geopolitical region, is representative of the antebellum South. Arkansas and Tennessee represents the upper South and Louisiana and Mississippi the lower South. The region demonstrates much geographical diversity, but the main division is between the alluvial areas, where plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings predominate, and the uplands, which feature farming and small-scale slaveholding. The 1.16 million slaves of the region constitute more than a third of the Confederacy’s slave population. The slaveholders of the antebellum South are a distinct elite, especially in the lower Mississippi valley. The slave populations of the region also engender complex communities and a vibrant cultural life. Other than the South Carolina lowcountry and the Chesapeake, the lower Mississippi valley achieves the highest stage of historical development as a slave society within the antebellum South.

Under Andrew Johnson’s policy, Mississippi begins process of Reconstruction, while governments of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana extend and solidify their authority. Freedpeople mobilize and organize to articulate and instantiate freedom, underscored by black convention in Nashville in August 1865 that calls for political and legal equality. Mississippi Reconstruction convention in August is the first such convention held by unreconstructed state under Johnson’s policy. Convention highlighted by acrimonious debate over abolition of slavery. Some delegates express view – articulated by conservative Unionists – that Emancipation Proclamation had only freed slaves but had not abolished slavery, and that Mississippi is under no obligation to abolish slavery as a condition of restoration to the Union. Mississippi abolishes slavery, but process bodes ill for Johnson’s policy.

The secession crisis of 1860-61 in the lower Mississippi valley represents the crisis in the South as a whole. Secession is more contentious, and southern Unionism more prevalent, in Arkansas and Tennessee than in Louisiana and Mississippi. Support for secession initially corresponds to areas of plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings, but the Confederacy receives overwhelming white support after secession. Events outside the region shape the Union’s initial approach to the rebellion and to the problem of fugitive slaves, though the region also experiences internal disruptions in mobilizing for war. The lower Mississippi valley initially experiences little direct effect from the war, but control of the Mississippi River soon becomes central to Union strategy. By early 1862, preparations were underway for Federal incursions into the region. Although the issue of slavery becomes unavoidable, notions of “Reconstruction” remain limited, and few Northerners envision a reunion predicated on the abolition of slavery.

This chapter singularly focuses on the impacts of dikes (levees), including their design, management, and influence on hydrologic and fluvial sedimentary processes. Floodplain embankment commonly removes ~75% of the natural floodplain from annual flood pulse dynamics. Flood control by embankment fundamentally alters fluvial processes between, along, and beyond dikes. Over longer timescales dikes result in a unique floodplain environment characterized by distinctive morphologic, hydrologic, and sedimentary features that do not exist on natural floodplains. Dike breach ponds are distinctive hydrologic features along dikes that provide valuable ecosystem services. Embanked floodplains trap flood deposits that results in thicker and somewhat coarser flood deposits, which buries natural wetlands and infills floodplain lakes. This results in a channel belt ‘perched’ above low-lying flood basins, which increases the risk of avulsion. The chapter closes by integrating concepts related to channel engineering (Chapter 5) and floodplain embankment to arrive at an evolutionary model for engineered rivers, which provides a segue to flood basin management (Chapter 7).

This chapter examines modern approaches to river management as an alternative to traditional hard engineering that disconnected rivers from floodplains and degraded river environments. A range of measures are systematically reviewed to both reduce flood risk and improve river environments. The key measures reviewed includes meander bend reconnection, flood water retention, dike setback, groyne lowering, sediment diversion structures, and sediment replenishment. The latter approach is utilized along sediment starved rivers because of being fragmented by upstream dams (Chapter 4). Collectively, new measures are being adapted to an international range of rivers, and particularly along the Rhine River in accord with the EU Water Framework Directive. The tragedy of wetland loss at the Mississippi delta is examined with regards to coastal restoration, and in particular sediment diversion structures aligned with historic subdelta geomorphology and natural sedimentary processes. Integrated river basin management utilizes multiple approaches, including soft and hard engineering, with stakeholders having an important role in shaping the direction of river management.

Scientific advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth century meant climate began to be understood as something to be measured and described technically; yet the supposed objectivity of this scientific discourse became inseparable from the subjectivity of social comment and prejudice. With its interest in putting different discourses in tension, Modernist writing is well suited to challenge these conceptions, and the growing literary recognition of under- or unrepresented communities saw a diversity of cultures being written. While Modernist writers such as Stein and Stevens complicated easy assertions about the social effects of climate, Southern and African-American writers including Faulkner, Hurston and Hughes contested generalized or racially inflected climatic theories. It is the economy rather than environment that places the figures of American Modernist literature in their privileged or precarious positions, which only then determines whether they can exploit or are subject to the climate. Such writing reveals the limitations and failures of technical and economic understandings of the environment, troubling them with personal and bodily experience of weather.

The First World War was a shock to the US South. When the war started, the South was a provincial region mired in segregation and plantation agriculture, much as it had been before the Civil War. During the war, however, the South mobilized. Nearly one million southerners enlisted; almost all of the nation’s troops trained at bases hastily-constructed in the South, and the war dramatically reshaped the region’s social order. The war brought northerners and southerners into contact on a massive scale, which eroded sectional animosities, it gave African Americans an opportunity to challenge Jim Crow through military service, and it offered women new forms of social, political, and economic agency. All of these changes occurred during the frenzy of wartime. In the South, the war’s full effects were not evident until after the Armistice, when the soldiers returned. The social expansions that happened during the war contracted, but like a deflated balloon misshapen from use, the social order did not return precisely to previous conditions. This essay focus on the works of three Mississippi writers—William Alexander Percy, William Faulkner, and George Washington Lee—who depicted the experiences of soldiers returning from the war and post-war social landscape of the South.

Hannah earned extravagant praise from both fellow writers and critics, who were collectively bedazzled by his prolific and profound universe and his inimitable prose - at once brilliant and bizarre, gorgeous and grotesque. Even Hannah’s greatest fans admit to occasional “disgust” - he never shied away from violence, and its recipients were often women or racial others. It is into this desperate, violent world that Hannah compulsively deposits his Indians as not just inept but decidedly corrupt guides to a redemption that will not come. A pioneer of so-called “Grit Lit,” Hannah’s work rejects romanticism and nostalgia - conceits that typify and bedevil Indigenous and southern cultures simultaneously. There, the Indigenous motif poses not just as guide but at times as lingering fetish, drawing its subjects toward a narrative of fulfillment, albeit one based on hurt and horror rather than transcendence. For his primarily white southern male characters, the lessons of Indigenous conquest become a contemporary parable for the self-defeating desires, vacancies, betrayals, and violence of both southern history and modernity’s insidious bequests.

One of the motivations for changing judicial selection in Mississippi was court modernization. In the 1970s, Mississippi's judicial systems ranked last on an index of legal professionalism. However, a second motivation was more political: it came in response to demands, and lawsuits, from the African American community to revise the judicial districts from which trial judges were elected in order to increase the number of African American judges. There was also a touch of partisanship involved because not long before the legislature voted to switch to nonpartisan judicial elections, a small number of incumbent judges running for reelection switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. The legislature adopted nonpartisan judicial elections in 1994 on votes that did not evidence significant partisanship.

Of the eleven ex-Confederate states, the large majority saw Lily-Whites take control of the state party sometime in the late-Nineteenth or early-Twentieth Century. There were, however, three exceptions to this rule: South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi. While each of these states eventually saw some form of Lily-Whiteism gain control, the Black-and-Tan organizations managed to hang onto power longer than elsewhere in the South. South Carolina’s Black-and-Tans machine finally fell apart at the 1940 national convention. Georgia began to see a clear decline in black delegates in 1952. And, finally, the Mississippi GOP remained under Black-and-Tan control up to the 1960 national convention. Why did these three state organizations buck the trend? The histories presented in this chapter show that the party organization’s survival in each state relied upon on the ability of individual party leaders to withstand a series of major challenges to their control in the 1920s. Each of the leaders in these state parties – “Tieless Joe” Tolbert in South Carolina, Walter H. Johnson and Ben Davis in Georgia, and Perry Howard in Mississippi – faced considerable opposition, both locally and from national leaders like Harding and Hoover. Yet each leader managed to survive these challenges – at least for a while – through strategic choices, some element of luck, and (in the cases of Johnson, Davis, and Howard) support from black Republicans outside of the South.

Faulkner’s tragic masterpiece is, in essence, a novel of encounter, one in which different, even irreconcilable worlds collide most explicitly through their opposed understanding of race. New Orleans, in this novel, represents the radically cosmopolitan, a loose and ever-changing mix of Spain and France, Virginia and Kentucky, Haiti and Cuba, as well as many ethnicities and nationalities of Africa. In contrast, the world of Mississippi is organized according to the brutal simplicity of only two kinds of people: white masters and black slaves. Out of this conflict between New Orleans and Mississippi, Faulkner showcases the potential of New Orleans to lead the United States toward a progressive racial politics.