Natchez, Mississippi in the context of "Natchez Trace Parkway"

The Natchez Trace, also known as the Old Natchez Trace, is a historic forest trail within the Southeastern United States which extends roughly 440 miles (710 km) from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, linking the Cumberland, Tennessee, and Mississippi rivers.

Native Americans created and used the trail for centuries. Early European and American explorers, traders, and immigrants used it in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. European Americans founded inns, also known as "stands", along the Trace to serve food and lodging to travelers. Most of these stands closed as travel shifted to steamboats on the Mississippi and other rivers. The heyday of the Trace began in the 1770s and ended in the 1820s; by the 1830s, the route was already in disrepair and its time as a major interregional commercial route had come to an end.

The Natchez (/ˈnætʃɪz/ NATCH-iz, Natchez pronunciation: [naːʃt͡seh]) are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area in the Lower Mississippi Valley, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi, in the United States. The DeSoto chronicle failed to record their presence when they came down the river in 1543. They speak a language with no known relatives, although it may be distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek Confederacy. The somewhat unreliable archivist Pierre Margry (fr) recorded the identity the Natchez applied to themselves as "the Theloel". An early American geographer noted in his 1797 gazetteer that they were also known as the "Sun Set Indians".

The Natchez are noted for being the only Mississippian culture with complex chiefdom characteristics to have survived long into the period of European colonization. Other Mississippian societies in the southeast had generally experienced important transformations shortly after contact with the Spanish Empire or other settler colonists from across the ocean. The Natchez are also noted for having had an unusual social system of nobility classes and exogamous marriage practices. It was a strongly matrilineal kinship society, with descent reckoned along female lines. The paramount chief named the Great Sun was always the son of the Female Sun, whose daughter would be the mother of the next Great Sun. This ensured that the chiefdom stayed under the control of the single Sun lineage. Ethnologists have not reached consensus on how the Natchez social system originally functioned, and the topic is somewhat controversial.

The Cotton Belt is a region of the Southern United States where cotton was the predominant cash crop from the late 19th century into the 20th century.

Before the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton production was limited to coastal plain areas of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, and, on a smaller scale, along the lower Mississippi River. The cotton gin allowed profitable processing of short-staple cotton, which could be grown in the upland regions of the Deep South. After 1793 the Natchez District rapidly became the leading cotton-producing region in Mississippi. Natchez planters developed new cotton plant hybrids and a mechanized system that fueled the spread of the cotton plantation system throughout the Old Southeast. The demand by European Americans for land to develop for upland cotton drove the removal of Native American tribes from the Southeast after 1830. The central part of this area, extending into Texas, became known as the Black Belt due to the color of the fertile soil and later the high proportion of slave population.

The Sandbar Fight, also known as the Vidalia Sandbar Fight, was a formal one-on-one duel that erupted into a violent brawl involving several combatants on September 19, 1827. It occurred on a large Mississippi River sandbar between Vidalia, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi. The fight resulted in the death of General Samuel Cuny and Major Norris Wright. The American pioneer and folk hero James Bowie survived but was seriously injured in the fight.

The site of the brawl was originally a neutral island in the middle of the river, with the river flowing mainly on the west side of the island. The river's main course has since moved to the east side of the island, so the site of the fight is thus located west of the modern river on Giles Island. However, the river's original path still serves as the border between Mississippi and Louisiana, so the brawl site is and always was within Mississippi.

A riverboat casino is a type of casino on a riverboat found in several states in the United States with frontage on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, or along the Gulf Coast. Several states authorized this type of casino in order to enable gambling, but limit the areas where casinos could be constructed. It was a type of legal fiction as the riverboats were rarely, if ever, taken away from the dock.