The history of the state of Mississippi extends back to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; with Europeans recording the accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events.
The first Colonizers to occupy the area of the present-day state were French colonists, followed later by Spanish and English colonists, particularly along the Gulf Coast. Euro-Americans did not enter the territory in great number until the early 19th century. Some early settlers would bring many enslaved Africans with them to serve as laborers to develop cotton plantations along major riverfronts. In 1817, Mississippi became a state of the United States. Through the 1830s, the federal government forced most of the native Choctaw and Chickasaw people west of the Mississippi River. White planters developed an economy based on the export of cotton produced by slave labor along the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. A small elite group of planters controlled most of the richest land, the wealth, and politics of the state, which led to Mississippi seceding from the Union in 1861. During the Civil War, its river cities particularly were sites of extended battles and widespread destruction.
The bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta were still 90% undeveloped after the Civil War. Thousands of migrants, both black and white, entered this area for a chance at land ownership. They sold timber while clearing land to raise money for purchases. During the Reconstruction era, many freedmen became owners of farms in these areas, and by 1900, composed two-thirds of the property owners in the Mississippi Delta. White Democrats regained control of the state legislature in the late 19th century, and in 1890, passed a disfranchising constitution, resulting in the exclusion of African Americans from political life until the mid-1960s. Most African Americans lost their lands due to disenfranchisement, segregation, financial crises, and an extended decline in cotton prices. By 1920, most African Americans were landless sharecroppers and tenant farmers. However in the 1930s, some blacks acquired land under low-interest loans from New Deal programs; in 1960 Holmes County still had 800 black farmers, the most of any county in the state. The state continued to rely mostly on agriculture and timber into the 20th century, but mechanization and acquisition of properties by megafarms would change the face of the labor market and economy.
During the early through mid-20th century, the two waves of the Great Migration led to hundreds of thousands of rural blacks leaving the state. As a result, by the 1930s, African Americans were a minority of the state population for the first time since the early 19th century. They would remain a majority of the population in many Delta counties. Mississippi also had numerous sites of activism related to the Civil Rights Movement, as African Americans sought to re-establish their constitutional rights for access to public facilities, including all state universities, and the ability to register, vote, and run for office.
In the 21st century, Mississippi has expanded its medical and professional communities in cities such as Jackson, the state capital. The state legislature approved gaming casinos on riverboats on the Mississippi River and along the Gulf Coast, which has led to increases in tourism in these areas, helping generate revenues for the state.
