Mississippi State University for Agriculture and Applied Science known as Mississippi State University, is a public land-grant research university adjacent to Starkville, Mississippi. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity" and has a total research and development budget of $239.4 million, the largest in Mississippi. The university was chartered as Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College on February 28, 1878 and admitted its first students in 1880. Organized into 12 colleges and schools, the university offers over 180 baccalaureate and professional degree programs, is home to Mississippi's only accredited programs in architecture and veterinary medicine. Mississippi State participates in the National Sea Grant College Program and National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program; the university's main campus in Starkville is supplemented by auxiliary campuses in Meridian and Vicksburg. The 19th and current president of Mississippi State is Mark E. Keenum, a former United States Under Secretary of Agriculture.

Mississippi State's intercollegiate sports teams, the Mississippi State Bulldogs, compete in NCAA Division I athletics as members of the Southeastern Conference's western division. Mississippi State was a founding member of the SEC in 1932. In their more-than 120-year history, the Bulldogs have won 21 individual national championships and 30 regular season conference championships; the school is noted for a pervasive baseball fan culture, with Dudy Noble Field holding 17 of the top 25 all-time NCAA attendance records and the school's Left Field Lounge being described as an epicenter of college baseball. The university began as The Agricultural and Mechanical College of the State of Mississippi, one of the national land-grant colleges established after Congress passed the Morrill Act in 1862, it was created by the Mississippi Legislature on February 28, 1878, to fulfill the mission of offering training in "agriculture and the mechanical arts... without excluding other scientific and classical studies, including military tactics."

The university received its first students in the fall of 1880 in the presidency of General Stephen D. Lee. In 1887 Congress passed the Hatch Act, which provided for the establishment of the Agricultural Experiment Station in 1888; the Cooperative Extension Service was established in 1914 by the Smith-Lever Act. The university redefined by the Legislature. In 1932, the Legislature renamed the university as Mississippi State College. In 1958 the Legislature renamed the university Mississippi State University in recognition of its academic development and addition of graduate programs; the Graduate School had been organized, doctoral degree programs had begun, the School of Forest Resources had been established, the College of Arts and Sciences had replaced the General Science School. The university was uneventfully desegregated in July 1965, when Richard E. Holmes, a graduate of Henderson High School in Starkville, became the first African-American student to enroll; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by Congress the year before, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was being debated, the United States Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

The School of Architecture admitted its first students in 1973, the College of Veterinary Medicine admitted its first class in 1977. The MSU Vet school is the largest veterinary school under one roof in the nation; the School of Accountancy was established in 1979. The University Honors Program was founded in 1968 to provide more rigorous course curricula for academically talented students and support guest lecture series and distinguished external scholarships; the program has a separate college. This was made possible by funding by Bobby Shackouls, an MSU alumnus and retired CEO, who donated US$10 million to found the Judy and Bobby Shackouls Honors College in April 2006. MSU started a joint Ph. D. program in engineering with San Jose State University in California, allowing an increase in research for both universities, as well as enhancing the stature of both engineering colleges. In March 2009, Mississippi State announced the conclusion of the university's seven-year capital campaign, with more than $462 million received in private gifts and pledges.

Mississippi State University is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools to award baccalaureate, master's, doctoral degrees. Today, the university has the following colleges and schools: As of Fall 2011, Mississippi State's enrollment was 20,424; the university has 160 buildings, the grounds comprise about 4,200 acres, including farms and woodlands of the Experiment Station. The university owns an additional 80,000 acres across the state. Mississippi State University operates an off-campus, degree-granting center in Meridian that offers undergraduate and graduate programs. In cooperation with the U. S. Army Engineer Waterways Experiment Station, the College of Engineering offers the Master of Science degree to students in Vicksburg. Mississippi State's campus is centered on the main quadrangle, called the Drill Field due to its heavy use by the Corps of Cadets prior to the end of World War II; the Drill Field is defined at its north and south ends by the mirror-image buildings, Lee Hall and Swalm Hall.

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The Northwood Plume Stakes, raced as the Bass Strait Beef Steaks is a registered Melbourne Racing Club Group 3 Thoroughbred horse race for mares four years old and older, run at set weights with penalties, over a distance of 1200 metres at Caulfield Racecourse, Australia in October. Prizemoney is A$200,000; the registered race is named after Northwood Plume, who won the 1994 The Thousand Guineas–VRC Oaks double and was named Champion three-year-old filly that season. The race is held on the first day of the MRC Spring Carnival. Since 2010, if the winner of the event has won one of the two heats the connections will win a $50,000 bonus from William Hill. 2005 - Thai Airways International Classic 2006 - Northwood Plume Stakes 2007–2008 - Le Tan Stakes 2009 - Northwood Plume Stakes 2010–2014 - Sportingbet Sprint Series Final 2015–2018 - Cape Grim Beef Steaks 2019 - Bass Strait Beef Steaks 2005 onwards - Caulfield Racecourse 2006–2012 - Listed race 2013 onwards - Group 3 List of Australian Group races Group races

François-Désiré Froment-Meurice was a French goldsmith, working in a free and naturalistic manner in the tradition of Mannerist and Baroque masters. One version of his Coupe des Vendanges, the "Harvest Cup", made in 1844, is conserved at the Musée du Louvre. Born in Paris to a goldsmith of moderate reputation, François Froment, he was soon left fatherless, his mother remarried Pierre Meurice. François-Désiré Froment, who took his stepfather's name, having graduated from the Lycée Charlemagne was apprenticed as a ciseleur, or chaser, developed his own renown, he took up the family workshop from 1832, with such success that he obtained two silver medals at the 1839 Exposition des produits de l'industrie— which gained him the appointment as orfèvre-joailler to the city of Paris— and a gold medal in the French Industrial Exposition of 1844. From 1849, he exhibited in London and thenceforth across Europe. Established near the Hôtel de Ville de Paris in 1828, he removed to the quartier of the Madeleine after 1848.

Under the Second Empire he maintained his showrooms at 50, rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré. Victor Hugo wrote a poem celebrating the ciseleur's art that commences: Nous sommes frères: la fleurPar deux arts peut être faite. Le poète est ciseleur. Froment-Meurice died at the peak of his fame before the opening of the Exposition Universelle of 1855. In his appointment to the city of Paris he was responsible for the ceremonial cradle offered by Paris at the birth of the Prince Impérial Eugène-Louis Napoléon, conserved at the Musée Carnavalet. In a semi-official commission, he produced a spectacular equipped toilette for the duchess of Parma, now at the Musée d'Orsay, it was completed in time to be included in the Great Exhibition, London, 1851. Among his private clients were writers and dandies, like Honoré de Balzac and the fastidious Théophile Gautier. For Balzac Froment-Meurice executed a canne aux singes designed by the sculptor Pierre-Jules Cavelier, which Balzac presented to his brother-in-law Georges Mniszech.

For the connoisseur-collector the duc de Luynes, he carried out a table of repoussé silver. His son Émile Froment-Meurice, after some tentative beginnings, carried on the family atelier until 1913. At the Exposition Universelle the Maison Froment-Meurice exhibited a monumental sculptural overmantel for the Hôtel de Ville, lost in the fire that consumed the building during the Paris Commune of 1870; the Paris Tiara, given to Pope Leo XIII by the people of Paris in 1888 to commemorate his Golden Jubilee as a priest, was designed and executed by the younger Froment-Meurice. An exhibition, Les Froment-Meurice, Orfèvres romantiques parisiens, was presented by the Musée de la Vie romantique, Paris, in 2003.