Sarah I. Rodriguez, M.A. in History student, University of West Georgia

Boats, brothels, booze; Natchez has it all. Natchez, Mississippi is a small town on the Mississippi River that has a long history of a vice economy. That economy remained bustling into the twentieth century, meaning that brothels functioned at the same time that the Civil Rights Movement came to Natchez, the Kinsey Report was released, and desegregation slowly pushed Jim Crow policies back. How did these phenomena exist within the same small community? Sarah I. Rodriguez discusses how to create a historical geodatabase reflecting the history of the sex work industry in Natchez industry during the mid-1900s and how mapping this history provides an illustrative picture of how interconnected sex work was with the racial, sexual, political, and economic infrastructure of this small Southern town.