It was 1988. Winter semester of my sophomore year at the University of North Carolina had just started, and I had been lucky enough to get into a junior-year course on the history of the Old South. I had never heard a Mississippian speak until Professor Peter Walker went through the usual formalities that begin a course. He then drew a map of Mississippi on the blackboard, which he dotted with X’s that marked all kinds of places, a few of which I recognized. At first I figured those places had to be important, but then I realized that this might have been an exercise in driving home just how ignorant we all really were—at least on the subject of where small towns in Mississippi are.