Mississippi (Alternity)

Mississippi (MS) is a state located in the Southern United States. It was admitted to the Union as the 24th state on December 10, 1819 and shares borders with Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, West Florida to the south, and Louisiana and Arkansas to the west, across the river for which the state is named. The largest city is Birmingham, and the state capital of Aberdeen (pop. 100,000) is the fifth-largest city in the state.

Mississippi was a major grower of cotton in the US prior to the Civil War, was the second state (following South Carolina) to secede from the Union in 1861, and became one of the founding members of the Confederate States of America. During the war, the Mississippi River was the center of a Union campaign headed by General (and later 17th US president) Ulysses S. Grant, who laid siege to and captured the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg in neighboring West Florida. Mississippi was readmitted to the Union under Abraham Lincoln's Ten-Percent Plan in 1868, and underwent radical political changes in the latter half of the 19th century, which included two new state constitutions, and the typical Jim Crow laws of the era that restricted the rights of blacks. In the 1960s, Mississippi was a center for the Civil Rights Movement and the scenes of protests by now-legendary figures such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Part of the state's true legacy, on the other hand, comes from the invention of five popular and/or mainstream music types (gospel, country, jazz, blues, and rock and roll) that, to this day, are composed and listened to by Americans nationwide.

Counties
Mississippi is subdivided into 32 counties, of which, the 10 largest are listed below in order of population.



