Gulfport, MS
A 33,000-square-foot aviation museum at 429 Pass Road in Gulfport, founded around the legacy of John C. Robinson — a Gulfport native and the first African-American combat pilot, who flew for Emperor Haile Selassie's Ethiopian Air Force in the 1935–36 war against Mussolini's Italian invasion. Robinson was known to the world as the "Brown Condor." Returning to the U.S., he became one of the original instructors who trained the Tuskegee Airmen. The museum's Mississippi Aviation Hall of Fame holds bronze busts of Apollo astronauts Fred Haise (born in Biloxi) and Stu Roosa, Shuttle astronauts Donald Peterson and Richard Truly, the Key Brothers (1935 endurance record holders), Roscoe Turner, and Jesse Brown (first African-American naval aviator, killed at Chosin Reservoir). Galleries on the Tuskegee Airmen, the Air Force's 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron Hurricane Hunters (based at Keesler AFB next door), crop dusting, and Mississippi's military bases from 1917 to today.
A Gulf-front estate on Beach Boulevard in Biloxi, between Gulfport and Biloxi proper. Jefferson Davis, the only President of the Confederate States of America, lived here from 1877 until his death in 1889 — the years after the Civil War when he wrote "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government" in the small library cottage on the grounds. The house was built in 1848 in the Greek Revival raised-cottage style; Davis didn't build it but bought it from its original owner's family. After Davis's death, his widow Varina sold the property to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1903 with the condition that it be preserved as a Confederate veterans' home (which it operated as until 1957) and then as a memorial to her husband. The site was severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — the museum and Confederate cemetery were destroyed, the main house unroofed. Restoration completed in 2008. The site remains controversial as Confederate-memory landscape, and the on-site Presidential Library was rebuilt as a more conventional historical museum.
The French Quarter — the Vieux Carré, "Old Square" — is the original city the French laid out in 1718 on a bend of the Mississippi, and three centuries of French, Spanish, Creole, African, and Caribbean culture pressure-cooked into something found nowhere else in America. The Spanish rebuilt it in masonry with wrought-iron galleries after fires in the 1790s, which is why a "French" Quarter looks Spanish. It's the birthplace of jazz, the home of Mardi Gras, Creole and Cajun cooking, above-ground "cities of the dead" cemeteries, and a street grid that floods because the whole bowl of the city sits below sea level behind levees. Jackson Square, St. Louis Cathedral, and the river levee anchor it; the streetcars still run up St. Charles.
Fly into KMSY and the National WWII Museum is downtown in the Warehouse District, six acres across three blocks. The reason it's in New Orleans and not Washington is Andrew Higgins, the local boatbuilder whose Higgins Industries built the flat-bottomed LCVP landing craft that put American troops onto the beaches from Normandy to Guadalcanal, more than 20,000 of them. Eisenhower called him the man who really won the war; historian Stephen Ambrose heard that and built the museum around it. The draw for a pilot is the aircraft hung through the pavilions: a B-17E named My Gal Sal, pulled off a Greenland ice cap 53 years after she went down, plus a B-25, an SBD Dauntless, a TBF Avenger, a P-51, an F4U Corsair, and a Bf 109. There's also a Higgins boat, a submarine experience built around the USS Tang's last mission, and the Road to Berlin and Road to Tokyo galleries. The Tom Hanks-produced film is worth the time.