The Mississippi Valley

The Mississippi Valley - more precisely the Mississippi Alluvial Plain - is the broad, flat floodplain built by the lower Mississippi River as it winds toward the Gulf of Mexico. Stretching from southern Illinois down through Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, it is the floor of an ancient embayment, filled over millennia with deep, fertile sediment laid down by the river's repeated flooding.

That rich alluvial soil made the valley, and especially the Mississippi Delta, into legendary cotton country, with a history bound up in slavery, sharecropping, and the birth of the blues. Holding back the river took one of the largest levee systems on Earth, yet catastrophic floods - 1927 above all - and, near the coast, hurricanes like Katrina, are recurring threats in this low, water-shaped land.

• The Deep South
  The historic cotton heart of the South related
• The Mississippi River
  The great river that drains the American heartland related