Gulf Coast Library Presents Book Talk, The Mississippi Encyclopedia, Aug. 31
Fri, 08/25/2017 - 01:41pm | By: Donna Smith
The Gulf Coast Library at The University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Park Campus will host a book talk, featuring Dr. Deanne Stephens, associate dean in the College of Arts and Letters, Thursday, August 31.
Presenting The Mississippi Encyclopedia, Stephens has contributed six articles to the compilation, which includes more than 1,600 entries, 1,451 pages, and features more than 700 scholars who wrote entries on every county, governor, and numerous musicians, writers, artists and activists. This event will be held from 4 – 5 p.m. in the Academic Success Center inside the Gulf Coast Library on the Gulf Park campus in Long Beach.
The Mississippi Encyclopedia is the first encyclopedic treatment of the state since 1907. Each entry provides an authoritative but accessible introduction to the topic discussed. The Mississippi Encyclopedia also features long essays on agriculture, archaeology, the civil rights movement, the Civil War, education, fiction, folk life, food ways, geography, industry, law, medicine, music, Native Americans, poetry, politics and government, the press, religion, social and economic history, sports, and visual art. It includes solid, clear information in a single volume, offering with clarity and scholarship a breadth of topics unavailable anywhere else.
Stephens is an associate professor of history who specializes in Mississippi history, 19-century medical history, and women's studies. In addition to The Mississippi Encyclopedia, she has had articles published in The Gulf Coast Historical Review, the Journal of Mississippi History, The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of Arts & Letters in the South, Women at War: An Encyclopedia, and The Southeastern Political Review. Her book, Plague Among the Magnolias: The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi, was published in 2009 by University of Alabama Press. She is currently completing a manuscript titled The Mississippi Gulf Coast Seafood Industry: A History of People and researching Mississippi boat builders.
Stephens also has chapters in The Uniting States: The Story of Statehood for the Fifty United States; Race and Ethnicity in Maritime America; Nurses on the Frontline; and Mississippi: A Bicentennial Celebration, forthcoming. She has co-authored a chapter in Resorting to Casinos: How the Mississippi Casino/Resort Industry Was Made and contributed to a chapter in Katrina: The Mississippi Story.
For more information, contact Donna Smith at 228.214.3465 or at Donna.BSmithFREEMississippi. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.