Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mississippi became the 20th state on the 10th of December 1817, with David Holmes serving as its first governor. It declared secession from the Union on the 9th of January 1861, and was restored to the Union on the 23rd of February 1870.
By 1860, enslaved African Americans numbered 436,631, representing 55 percent of Mississippi's total population of 791,305 persons. Mississippi was the nation's top cotton-producing state at that time, and the value of enslaved people accounted for roughly 43 percent of the state's total assessed property valuation.
The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed on the 27th of September 1830, between the U.S. Government and the Choctaw Nation. The Choctaw agreed to sell their traditional homelands in Mississippi and Alabama in exchange for compensation and removal to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Today approximately 9,500 descendants identifying as Choctaw live in Neshoba, Newton, Leake, and Jones counties, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians is a federally recognized tribe.
Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964. Their killings by Ku Klux Klan members and sympathizers became a catalyst for Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mississippi, particularly the Mississippi Delta region, is the birthplace of blues music. Blues, along with gospel, country, jazz, and rock and roll, were all invented, promoted, or heavily developed by Mississippi musicians, many of them African American. Mississippi musicians carried these traditions north to Chicago, where they became central to that city's jazz and blues scene.
Hurricane Camille struck the Mississippi coast on the 17th of August 1969, as a Category 5 storm, killing 248 people and causing $1.5 billion in damage in 1969 dollars. Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, though a Category 3 storm at final landfall, caused even greater destruction across 90 miles of Gulf Coast and resulted in 238 deaths in Mississippi. Both storms caused nearly total storm surge destruction in and around Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula.