Mississippi Humanities Council

  • Interpreting Our History & Culture
  • Fostering Civil Conversations
  • Enriching Communities

Mississippi and World War II

That Mississippi changed more as a result of World War II than it did from the Civil War is a proposition put forward by Ray Skates in the Journal of Mississippi History and by Morton Sosna in Remaking Dixie. Reviewing the argument that Mississippi remained basically the same through Reconstruction and the New Deal, the speaker discusses the “home front” with training camps, foreign travel, and the problem of fitting Japanese into the state’s segregation and describes the economic development brought about by the war. Ultimately, changes in the state were reflected in the shift away from the national Democratic party by 1944 and the growth of “states’ rights” as an important issue.

Speakers Expertise:

Dennis J. Mitchell is professor emeritus at Mississippi State University where he taught and administered the Division of Arts and Sciences for twenty years until he retired in 2016. Mitchell now divides his time between Mississippi and New Mexico. He edits the Journal of Mississippi History and is the author of several articles and books including the New History of Mississippi.  His graduate degrees are from the University of Mississippi in British History. After a stint as Assistant Director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, he taught mostly world history at Jackson State University for twenty years. During that time, he traveled widely, financed by summer grants, in places such as India and Africa. One grant enabled him to study Shona at Michigan State University and later in Zimbabwe. When Mitchell turned to studying and writing Mississippi history, he did it with a different perspective.