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The state of Mississippi's history extends to thousands of years of indigenous peoples. Evidence of their cultures has been found largely through archeological excavations, as well as existing remains of earthwork mounds built thousands of years ago. Native American traditions were kept through oral histories; the Europeans recorded accounts of historic peoples they encountered. Since the late 20th century, there have been increased studies of the Native American tribes and reliance on their oral histories to document their cultures. Their accounts have been correlated with evidence of natural events. The first European explorers to settle in the area of the present-day state were French colonists, and later some Spanish and English, particularly along the Gulf Coast. European Americans did not enter the territory in great number until the early nineteenth century, and then they brought many enslaved African Americans with them to serve as laborers to develop cotton plantations along major riverfronts. Through the 1830s, the federal government forced most of the native Choctaw and Chickasaw people west of the Mississippi River. White planters developed an economy based on the export of cotton produced by slave labor along the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. A small elite group of planters controlled most of the richest land, the wealth, and the politics of the state, which seceded from the Union in 1861. Its river cities particularly were sites of extended battles during the Civil War, and there was widespread destruction. The bottomlands of the Mississippi Delta were still 90% undeveloped after the Civil War. Thousands of migrants, both black and white, entered the area for a chance at land ownership. They sold timber while clearing land to raise money for purchases. During Reconstruction, many freedmen became owners of farms in these areas and by 1900 composed two-thirds of the property owners in the Delta. After white Democrats regained control of the state legislature in the late 19th century, in 1890 they passed a disfranchising constitution, resulting in the exclusion of African Americans from political life until the late 1960s. Most lost their lands due to disenfranchisement, segregation, financial crises, and an extended decline in cotton prices. By 1920 most were landless sharecroppers and tenant farmers. But in the 1940s, some blacks acquired land under low-interest loans in the New Deal; in 1960 Holmes County still had 800 black farmers, the most of any county in the state. The state continued to rely mostly on agriculture and timber into the 20th century, but mechanization and acquisition of properties by megafarms have changed the labor market and economy. Through the two waves of the Great Migration, hundreds of thousands of rural blacks left the state. As a result, by the 1930s African Americans were a minority of the population for the first time since the early nineteenth century, but they were a majority of the population in many Delta counties. The state had numerous sites of activism related to the Civil Rights Movement, as African Americans sought to re-establish their constitutional rights for access to public facilities, including all state universities, and the ability to register, vote and run for office. In the 21st century, the state has expanded its medical and professional communities in cities such as Jackson, the capital. The state legislature approved gaming casinos on riverboats on the Mississippi River and along the Gulf Coast, which has led to increases in tourism in these areas, generating revenues for the state. ==Native Americans== At the end of the last Ice Age, Native Americans or Paleo-Indians appeared in what today is the Southern United States. Paleo-Indians in the South were hunter-gatherers who pursued the megafauna that became extinct following the end of the Pleistocene age. A variety of indigenous cultures arose in the region, including some that built great earthwork mounds more than 2,000 years ago.〔 The last of the mound builders were the Mississippian culture, which arose about 950CE, developing along the Mississippi and its tributaries throughout the center of North America, extending into the Southeast. They had a wide trading network extending from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. These people also built mounds and complex settlements, including in Mississippi, that were densely inhabited. The culture generally reached its peak in the 14th century, and many settlements were abandoned by the 15th century.〔Busbee (2005)〕 The Mississippian culture disappeared in most places before European encounter. Archeological and linguistic evidence has shown their descendants are the historic Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples, who were later counted by colonists as among the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast. They developed complex cultures long before European encounter. Other tribes who inhabited the territory that became known as Mississippi (and whose names were given by colonists to local towns and features) include the Natchez, Yazoo, Pascagoula, and the Biloxi. French, Spanish and English colonists all traded with these tribes in the early colonial years. Pressure from European-American settlers increased during the early nineteenth century, after invention of the cotton gin made cultivation of short-staple cotton profitable. This was readily cultivated in the upland areas of the South, and its development could feed an international demand for cotton in the 19th century. Migrants from the United States entered Mississippi mostly from the north and east, coming from the Upper South and coastal areas. Eventually they gained passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which achieved federal forced removal of most of the indigenous peoples during the 1830s to areas west of the Mississippi River. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of Mississippi」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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