James Silcock
04/21/15
History of Mississippi History of Mississippi has made it the state that it is today by several outstanding events and great inventions. First, there was the invention of blues. Then there was the mass production of cotton. Last but not least, the man who might have been the bravest and most brilliant idealist ever. His name is Dr. James D. Hardy the man that attempted the first organ transplant. Even though some of these occurrences were not that great, they have made a tremendous impact on the world that we live in today.
First, the Mississippi Delta is generally considered to be the birthplace of the blues, with the new musical form emerging around the turn of the 19th century. But the story of the blues dates back before the Civil War and to the West coast of Africa where countless men, women and children were captured by slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic for forced labor on Southern plantations. Slaves from many African countries carried the songs and music of their respective homelands to America. There, amidst the hard work, fear and oppression, the slaves found a temporary escape in music and expressed both hope and despair in their songs. The musical traditions of numerous African cultures blended as the slaves worked side by side in the steamy fields of the south. Field hollers and work songs were a means of expression and communication — which were often not otherwise allowed by the plantation overseers. With few instruments and little or no money, the slaves used their own voices and clapped percussion as musical tools. Their original methods of creating music became significant elements in the creation of the blues.
Then there is the cotton industry that for a little more than one hundred years, from shortly after the state's founding through the Great Depression, cotton was the undisputed king of Mississippi's largely countryside economy. By the mid-19th century, "King Cotton" had become the backbone of the southern American economy. By the 1840s, India was no longer capable of supplying the vast quantities of cotton fibers needed by mechanized British factories, while shipping bulky, low-price cotton from India to Britain was time-consuming and expensive. This, coupled with the emergence of American cotton as a superior type due to the longer, stronger fibers of the two domesticated native American species, Gossypium Hirsutum and Gossypium Barbadense, encouraged British traders to purchase cotton from plantations in the United States and plantations in the Caribbean In the United States, cultivating and harvesting cotton became the leading occupation of slaves. During the American Civil War, American cotton exports slumped due to a Union blockade on Southern ports, and also because of a strategic decision by the Confederate government to cut exports, hoping to force Britain to recognize the Confederacy or enter the war. This prompted the main purchasers of cotton, Britain and France, to turn to Egyptian cotton. Today, Mississippi is number two in the nationwide cotton industry.
Finally, there is Dr. James D. Hardy the man with the greatest accomplishment. He was born in Mississippi on May 14, 1918 in Birmingham Alabama. Dr. Hardy first attended college at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa where he graduated in 1938.