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MHS Presents History Awards
State’s Museums Explored as Theme Of Annual Meeting
The Mississippi Historical Society honored groups and individuals for achievements in the field of Mississippi History at its annual meeting March 6-8 in Jackson. Presentations highlighted the state’s art, history, and music museums to match the conference’s theme as chosen by president Charles L. Sullivan.
“Museums are where the work of the historian reaches the public across all bounds of age, gender, race, and creed. The vast majority of people do not read very much, but whole families will visit these institutions,” said Sullivan. “Museum exhibits are the single most important disseminator of historical knowledge.”
MDAH Museums Division director Lucy Allen, Mississippi Civil Rights Museum project
project at the Friday luncheon. Beauvoir Foundation president Bertram Hayes-Davis presented the keynote banquet address, “The Jefferson Davis Presidential Library and Museum.”
The society’s highest honor, the B.L.C. Wailes award for national distinction in the field of history, went to Vicksburg native William R. Ferris, founder of the groundbreaking Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Ferris’s broad areas of scholarship cover the fields of folklore, American literature, music, and photography. While at the University of Mississippi he co-edited the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, a major reference work with entries on every aspect of southern culture that links popular, folk, and academic cultures. His film Mississippi Blues (1983) was featured at the Cannes Film Festival. Among his sound recordings are High-
MHS president Ann Simmons and outgoing president Charles Sullivan.
director Jacqueline K. Dace, and Museum of Mississippi History project director Cindy Gardner gave an overview of the 2 Mississippi Museums
way 61 Blues: James “Son" Thomas (1983) and Bothered All the Time (1983). He is the author of Ray Lum s Tales of Horses, Mules, and Men (1992), Local
Color (1982), and Images of the South: Visits with Eudora Welty and Walker Evans (1978). His most recent books are Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues and The Storied South: Voices of the Writers and Artists. Ferris is senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South and the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History at the University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill.
Barbara Carpenter, retired director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, received the Dunbar Rowland Award for her lifelong contributions to the preservation, study, and interpretation of Mississippi history. Carpenter spent twenty-seven years with the MHC, seventeen as its director. Under her guidance the group developed programs such as Food for Thought and Family Reading Bonds that helped bring humanities programs to communities across the state. She is the editor of Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi and co-editor of Ethnic Heritage in Mississippi: The Twentieth Century.
“Dr. Carpenter helped to create the Mississippi Oral History Project, a partnership with MDAH and the Center for Oral History at the University of Southern Mississippi, that has helped capture the story of Mississippi through the voices of its people in hundreds of recorded interviews,” said MHC director
Stuart Rockoff. “These records of the state’s rich and diverse history will be used for generations to come.”
William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography by University of North Carolina-Greensboro professor Charles C. Bolton was awarded the McLemore Prize for best
B.L.C. Wailes Award winner William Ferris.
history book of 2013. This first biography of Winter, the former Mississippi governor known for his fights for education and racial reconciliation, traces his life and influences from boyhood days in Grenada County to his service in World War II and through his long career of public service in Mississippi.
Ty Adair received the John K. Bettersworth Award for outstanding history teacher. Adair served eight years in the United States Navy before becoming a teacher. He teaches Advanced Placement European history and United States government, U.S. history, world history, and Mississippi studies at Starkville High School.
“One of the qualities that sets