Mississippi

Before Coca-Cola came in bottles, you could only get it at a soda fountain. In 1894, a candy store owner in Vicksburg named Joseph Biedenharn figured out how to bottle it so he could sell it to people out in the countryside.

Biedenharn kept at it, delivering cases to farms and lumber camps along the Mississippi River. The idea caught on, and within a few years, bottled Coca-Cola was spreading across the country.

The Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez peoples had lived across this land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto crossed the Mississippi River in 1540, making him one of the first Europeans to see it.

Mississippi became the 20th state in 1817, and cotton quickly took over the economy. By the Civil War, Mississippi had one of the largest enslaved populations in the country, and the brutal work on cotton plantations built fortunes for white landowners.

During the Civil War, Union forces laid siege to Vicksburg for 47 days, starving the city into surrender on July 4, 1863. Residents were so bitter that Vicksburg refused to officially celebrate Independence Day for more than 80 years.

The blues were born here. In the Mississippi Delta, Black workers turned field chants, spirituals, and heartbreak into a new kind of music that would shape jazz, rock and roll, and nearly every genre that followed.

B.B. King, Muddy Waters, and Elvis Presley all came from Mississippi.

Mississippi was also at the center of the civil rights movement. In 1955, the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money shocked the nation.

In 1962, it took federal marshals and U.S. soldiers to protect James Meredith when he became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi.

Visit the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum in Vicksburg, where you can see the original building and buy a Coke float from an old-fashioned soda fountain. Drive the Natchez Trace Parkway, a scenic 444-mile road that follows a path used by native peoples for centuries.

In Clarksdale, the Delta Blues Museum tells the story of the music that started it all. And in Tupelo, you can visit the tiny two-room house where Elvis Presley was born in 1935.