Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vicksburg surrendered on the 4th of July, 1863, when Confederate General John C. Pemberton yielded to Ulysses S. Grant after a 47-day siege. The surrender, occurring the day after Robert E. Lee's defeat at Gettysburg, is historically regarded as the turning point of the Civil War in the Union's favor.
Joseph A. Biedenharn, a confectioner born in 1866, first bottled Coca-Cola commercially in Vicksburg, Mississippi on the 12th of March 1894. His original candy store has been preserved and operates today as the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum.
The Vicksburg massacre began in December 1874 when armed white mobs drove out Black sheriff Peter Crosby and then killed Black residents throughout the city and surrounding Claiborne County. Contemporary reports recorded 29-50 Black deaths and 2 white deaths, while historian Emilye Crosby estimated the Black death toll at approximately 300. No one was ever prosecuted.
A Mississippi River flood in 1876 cut through the De Soto Point meander and rerouted the main channel away from Vicksburg, leaving the city fronting an oxbow lake. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers restored river access by completing the Yazoo Diversion Canal in 1903.
Vicksburg was incorporated in 1825, named after Newitt Vick, a Methodist minister who had established a Protestant mission on the site. The location had earlier been a French fort built in 1719 and a Spanish outpost called Fort Nogales established in 1790.
Parts of Vicksburg shunned Independence Day celebrations for decades after the 1863 surrender. The Vicksburg Evening Post called the 4th of July "the day we don't celebrate" in 1883, and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported in 1947 that the city did not celebrate the holiday again until 1945, when it was observed as Confederate Carnival Day.