Black Masking Indian Tradition
New Orleans Black Masking Indian tribes create monumental hand-sewn suits, songs, processions, and neighborhood identities through year-round collective work.
Places and wildlife — page 27
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Courir de Mardi Gras
Costumed rural groups travel house to house under captains, sing and perform for ingredients, then return to build a community gumbo.
Cajun Music and Dance
Accordion, fiddle, French song, rhythm, and social dancing keep a continually evolving Acadiana tradition active across halls, festivals, kitchens, and radio.
Zydeco
Black Creole musicians fused French-language roots, blues, rhythm and blues, accordion, rubboard, and amplification into one of Louisiana’s most kinetic social traditions.
Brown Pelican
Louisiana’s state bird patrols bays in low files, then folds into spectacular headfirst dives for schooling fish near the surface.
Roseate Spoonbill
A pink wader sweeps its spoon-tipped bill through shallow Louisiana water by touch, turning every side-to-side arc into a search below the glare.
Louisiana Black Bear
Louisiana’s state mammal survived severe habitat loss and recovered as bottomland forests and movement corridors were restored across the Mississippi alluvial valley.
Louisiana Pearlshell
A federally threatened mussel survives only in narrow central-Louisiana headwaters, where clean flowing sand and a fish host must remain connected for its life cycle to close.
American Alligator
Louisiana’s largest native reptile engineers wetland habitat, survives seasonal cold through dens, and demands generous distance wherever fresh water meets land.
Louisiana Pinesnake
Louisiana’s rarest large snake is mostly an underground relationship: open longleaf pine feeds a grass layer, grass sustains Baird’s pocket gophers, and their burrows shelter the pinesnake.
Swamp Rabbit
Louisiana’s largest cottontail lives close to water, swims readily, and hides in dense floodplain cover where most observers see only tracks or a bounding tail.
Red Swamp Crawfish
Louisiana’s familiar crawfish is both a wetland burrower and a major farmed food species, thriving in seasonal shallow water and rice-crawfish systems.
Gulf Menhaden
A hand-sized silver fish links plankton to pelicans, dolphins, drum, and one of America’s largest fisheries, making a surface bait ball both feeding event and management question.
Alligator Gar
North America’s largest gar is an air-breathing floodplain fish whose armored body and broad snout conceal a life history paced by rare, well-timed inundation.
Louisiana Eyed Silkmoth
A rust-brown Gulf marsh moth hides its great hindwing eyespots at rest, while its stinging caterpillar feeds in the cordgrass that defines the species’ narrow world.
Giant Blue Iris
Louisiana’s state wildflower is best understood as a wild wetland iris, not a garden cultivar: tall, locally variable, and spectacular for a short spring window.
Bald Cypress
Louisiana’s state tree is a deciduous conifer built for floodplain life, capable of forming ancient forests where buttressed trunks rise from seasonal water.
Water Tupelo
A water-swollen trunk rises from Louisiana’s deepest forested wetlands into a crown of broad leaves and blue-black fruit—decidedly not the neighboring bald cypress.
Southern Live Oak
Southern Live Oak turns a well-drained Louisiana ridge into horizontal architecture, carrying evergreen leaves, acorns, ferns, lichens, and moss across limbs broader than many buildings.
Mississippi Museum of Art
A focused state collection, ambitious changing exhibitions, and an art garden connect Mississippi artists to broader American and global conversations.
Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
Eight galleries center organizers, families, witnesses, violence, resistance, and the unfinished work of civil rights through testimony and primary evidence.
Museum of Mississippi History
A dugout canoe, documents, objects, sound, and immersive settings trace Mississippi from Indigenous homelands through the present without one uncomplicated storyline.
Mississippi Museum of Natural Science
Aquariums, fossils, native wildlife, scientific collections, and wooded trails make Mississippi ecology visible at both specimen and landscape scales.
GRAMMY Museum Mississippi
Instruments, stage wear, recorded voices, songwriting stations, and performance technology show how an unusually musical state shaped global popular culture.
B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center
B.B. King’s instruments, touring life, recordings, and homecoming anchor a broader account of cotton labor, migration, radio, business, and the blues.
Walter Anderson Museum of Art
Murals, watercolors, block prints, ceramics, and an extraordinary painted room reveal an artist who studied coastal nature through sustained immersion.
Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art
George Ohr’s astonishing clay, Frank Gehry’s pavilion campus, Coast art, and Biloxi history reward visitors who look past the famous eccentric persona.
Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience
The MAX connects music, writing, dance, visual art, theater, film, foodways, and craft through the Mississippians who carried them outward.
Delta Blues Museum
Historic guitars, recordings, stage material, and Muddy Waters’s cabin connect Delta musicians to labor, migration, technology, and world influence.
Lauren Rogers Museum of Art
American and European art, British silver, Japanese woodblock prints, and Native American baskets fill a carefully scaled 1923 museum in Laurel.
INFINITY Science Center
Full-scale hardware, interactive science, wetlands, and Stennis Space Center stories connect spaceflight to the people and landscapes supporting it.
Vicksburg National Military Park
Earthworks, monuments, the USS Cairo, cemetery, and steep terrain explain why Vicksburg became decisive—and what victory cost soldiers and civilians.
Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument
The Evers family home connects civil-rights organizing, domestic life, security, assassination, grief, and Myrlie Evers-Williams’s continuing public work.
Emmett Till Interpretive Center
A community-led center beside the courthouse interprets Emmett Till’s murder, the 1955 trial, racial terror, public memory, and local work toward truth and repair.
Melrose at Natchez National Historical Park
A furnished Greek Revival estate, surviving outbuildings, grounds, and guided interpretation expose wealth, enslavement, domestic work, and postwar change.
Longwood
A vast octagonal exterior encloses an unfinished brick interior where war, enslaved labor, wealth, technology, and preservation collide.
Rowan Oak
William Faulkner’s home, office, penciled plot outline, grounds, and preserved domestic spaces connect writing practice to Oxford and Lafayette County.
Eudora Welty House & Garden
Books, typewriters, correspondence, family objects, a restored garden, and guided rooms reveal how Eudora Welty observed, revised, photographed, and lived.
Windsor Ruins
Monumental surviving columns mark a plantation mansion lost to fire, but the site’s real history includes enslaved labor, war, memory, and romantic ruin-making.
Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center
A strong interpretive center, earthworks, water feature, maps, and personal accounts frame Corinth as a strategic rail junction and occupied community.
Brices Cross Roads National Battlefield Site
Monuments, fields, roads, and a preserved church site explain Nathan Bedford Forrest’s 1864 victory—and the limits of a small federal parcel.
Elvis Presley Birthplace
The small birthplace house, family church, museum, memorial chapel, and neighborhood landscape place Elvis Presley’s early life before fame.
Biloxi Lighthouse
A cast-iron 1848 lighthouse, female keepers, storm history, and a compact climb make the Gulf Coast’s resilience visible from inside the tower.
Mississippi State Capitol
A Beaux-Arts capitol, legislative chambers, stained glass, public art, and current government work invite architectural and civic reading together.
Grand Village of the Natchez Indians
Three mounds, a plaza, archaeological collections, and contemporary Natchez connections explain a political and ceremonial center active into the colonial era.
Emerald Mound
One of North America’s largest mounds reveals engineered earth, community labor, elevated architecture, and Natchez Trace history through subtle topography.
Winterville Mounds
A museum, broad plaza, and multiple platform mounds interpret an important Mississippian ceremonial center and the archaeology used to understand it.
Nanih Waiya
The homeland mound at the heart of Choctaw origin traditions asks visitors to understand sovereignty, living community, sacred geography, and respectful limits.