Editing Hidden History of the Mississippi Delta

Posted on by Josh Foreman

Our draft of Hidden History of the Mississippi Delta is finished and being reviewed by the discerning Hilary Parrish, our production editor. We received good news this week — a cover for the book has been designed. The cover will feature Greenville, Miss., during the Great Flood of 1927.

The back cover features an image from inside a juke joint in Clarksdale, Miss. It’s one of many particularly striking images we found from legendary photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott.

The back cover copy will give you a taste of what’s inside the book. Of course we had to revisit the De Soto expedition. De Soto led several hundred conquistadors through Mississippi in 1542, spending part of the spring in the Delta near Walls, Miss.

This was a fun book to work on, and looking more closely at the Delta was a real pleasure. Melissa, the kids and I spent a few days in Cleveland, Indianola, and Shaw last winter and had a good time at “The Guad” in Indianola and “Hey Joe’s” in Cleveland. I got to tour another part of the Delta a few months later when I visited Anne Martin in Rosedale. There’s no place like the Delta, that’s for dang sure.

Published by Josh Foreman

Josh Foreman grew up in the Jackson, Miss., area. He is an eleventh-generation Southerner and a sixth-generation Mississippian. From 2005-2014 he lived abroad, traveled, wrote and taught. He holds degrees from Mississippi State University and the University of New Hampshire. In the fall of 2019 he will join the Communication Department at Mississippi State as an instructor. He and Ryan Starrett are the authors of Hidden History of Jackson (2018), Hidden History of the Mississippi Sound (2019), and Hidden History of New Orleans (2020).