Mississippi

Mississippi takes its name and much of its character from the river along its western edge. The state is mostly low and gently rolling, capped in the northwest by the Mississippi Delta — not the river's mouth, but a wide, table-flat floodplain of extraordinarily rich alluvial soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. This black-earth country grew the cotton economy and, later, the blues. Eastward the land rises into pine hills and prairie before sloping to a short Gulf of Mexico coastline in the south.

Flooding built the Delta and long defined life along the river, until a vast system of levees was raised to hold the Mississippi in its channel. The Gulf coast, lined with barrier islands and bayou, sits squarely in hurricane country. Woodall Mountain, the high point at 807 feet (246 m), is a low rise in the northeast corner. Jackson, near the center, anchors a largely rural state whose geography — river, Delta, and coast — has shaped its agriculture and its culture alike.