Civil War & Reconstruction

A Prince Enslaved in Southwest Mississippi: The Story of Abdul Rahman Ibrahima (1762-1829)

Theme and Time Period

When Prince Abdul Rahman Ibrahima arrived in Natchez in 1788, he walked up a landing dock where he met Thomas Foster, a young farmer who would purchase him like cattle and keep him enslaved for forty years on a nearby plantation. Little did he or Foster know that after decades of hard labor, he would not only be free, but he would travel to Washington, D.C. and have a face-to-face meeting with the president of the United States before sailing back to West Africa.

Mississippi and the Lost Cause

Theme and Time Period
In the aftermath of the Civil War, White Southerners rewrote history in an attempt to vindicate their violent rebellion against the United States. They developed and promoted an ideology known as the Lost Cause.

The First Black Legislators in Mississippi

Theme and Time Period
In 2022, more than fifty African Americans were serving in the Mississippi State Legislature, carrying on the legacy of the first Black men who served there in 1870. Mississippi’s first Black legislators were farmers and lawyers, barbers and blacksmiths, teachers and ministers. Some had always known freedom, while others were born into slavery. Some were highly educated elsewhere, and others had never been taught to read because the law in Mississippi forbade it. Many came to Mississippi to help build a more just government, and many were driven out by violence only a few years later.

Mississippi's Forgotten Soldiers: Women in the Ranks during the Civil War

Theme and Time Period
Mississippi’s Civil War chronicle includes such notable generals as Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Joseph E. Johnston, and John C. Pemberton, as well as the thousands of common men they commanded.  Surprisingly, an untold number of daring women joined them on battlefields across the state, even though societal standards of the time forbade them to do so.