This year’s Looking Around Mississippi has been replaced by Looking Back Mississippi by Forrest Lamar Cooper. Cooper’s name did not ring a bell for me but you may have been reading his columns in Mississippi Magazine on history and culture for the past thirty years. Looking Back Mississippi is a sampling of some of Cooper’s best columns.
Once I had the chance to sit down with Looking Back Mississippi, I was delighted. My favorite history lesson so far is on Koscuisko, Mississippi–the town with the funny name that I think everyone knows the Mississippi pronunciation is a long way from accurate. Not being a native Mississippian, that’s about all I knew about the town.
Coming from a district in Polish Lithuania in the 1700s, Tadeusz Andrzei Bonawentura Kosciuszko’s (correctly pronounced Kosh-CHOOSH-ko) name was “Americanized” after living in Philadelphia for several years into its current pronunciation as we know it in Mississippi. But did you know that Tadeusz Kosciuszko was what we might call an overachiever?
Here are few of Koscuisko’s high points: he was a natural leader educated at a top military school in Warsaw during the 1700s; studied engineering and architecture in France; fell in love with one of his students and nearly was killed by her wealthy father; landed in America in 1776 and before long he had laid out defenses in Philadelphia; transformed the defenses at West Point into the “American Gibraltar”; used his pension to buy the freedom for as many slaves as possible. Kosciuiszko’s remarkable, “Brave and True” story, as Cooper titles it, goes on. What an honor it is to have part of his history in Mississippi.
Enjoy the rest of Kosciusko’s story at your leisure, reading through the rest of the stories and photographs in Looking Back Mississippi. The entire text is complimented by beautiful old postcards from the towns and places Cooper writes about. Cooper has an amazing collection of over 10,000 postcards of towns and places in pre-1920’s Mississippi.
The titles of each story may or may not have the name of the town in it. I was searching and searching to find the story about Kosciusko again after I read it the first time. The title “Brave and True” I could not remember. After reading several other stories, including stories about Corinth, Mize and the Citrus of the Gulf coast, I found that these vague titles encouraged me to read about places I was not naturally drawn to read. It was a pleasure. Though I am reluctant to say it yet, the holidays are coming. This book would make a lovely gift.
Join us on Tuesday, October 18th for a signing and reading with Forrest Lamar Cooper at 5:00 and 5:30.
Looking Back Mississippi is published by The University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
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