Arkansas History

One of the most powerful and pervasive narratives at work in the Arkansas Ozark Mountains is that of the "hillbilly." This narrative emphasizes ruralness, whiteness, and an antimodern attitude that both frames how the world sees the Ozarks and how Arkansans see themselves. Since 1997, archeological investigations have been ongoing at Van Winkle's Mill, the site of a late-19th-century sawmill community in the Arkansas Ozarks. This multidisciplinary research endeavor has provided important information about the African diaspora in the Ozarks and also aided in the understanding of the industrialization and modernization of the region. Most importantly, it provided a platform for public history that may shed light on the processes of remembering and forgetting at work in Ozark history that have led to the proliferation of myths about the Ozark past and the erasure of a rich African American heritage in the region.

An examination of the school-to-prison pipeline through analysis of education and prosecution resources, compared to demographics and literacy rates of public high school students and juvenile defendants in Little Rock, Arkansas.

This paper examines the school-to-prison pipeline in Little Rock Arkansas, a place of National Historic significance because of its place in history as a flash-point in our nation's history of our federal system of government, public education, and racial justice.

The school-to-prison pipeline perpetuates social stratification through long-term maintenance of inequitable systems and institutions. This paper expresses this dynamic through presentation of rates of literacy and prosecutions as compared to demographics and relative public accountability of each.  Findings relate to the concurrence of under-served schools and students, high-cost, low-performing, un-accountable senior administration, and juvenile defendants and prosecutions. In the public school district, relative resources and power of public institutions are disparately distributed in an entrenched status quo that remains firmly in place despite a state takeover four years ago.

There are presently insufficient mechanisms for the stakeholder public to access basic and important information about the operations and performance of their local county court house juvenile divisions. New means of access to information are needed to gauge the effectiveness of the adults responsible for delivering these important public services with life-long implications for all of our community’s young people and families they serve.

Schools and prisons are connected through allocations of police power and financial resources at all levels. The status quo perpetuates youth failure while it rewards adult failure, and it entrenches identifiable adults at the expense of the same youth and families they are employed to serve. When children and their families cannot enjoy and exercise the benefits of their rights as Americans, the general welfare is undermined, and these dynamics work against the well-being of a healthy society.

Dr. P. S. G. Watson was said to have known more preachers in antebellum Arkansas than anyone else. He described David Orr, one such pastor, as "over six feet high, slim, straight, longfaced, high forehead, long chin and thin lips, long nose, deep sunken, piercing black eyes, and long, black curly hair, sprinkled with gray when I saw him first-in January, 1844." 2 Yet the odds were high that even a common layperson knew who Orr was, for Orr spoke at, revived, and founded a number of churches in the territory/state. However, some people perhaps heard more of and about Orr than they cared for, as Orr spent a large amount of time on the political stump and in the courtroom as well as in the pulpit. Even though Orr is known to this day for his Baptist ministry, he seems to have joined many of his countrymen in the common pursuit-yet with his own means-for a simplified, egalitarian gospel of reform, wherever that truth may have been found. Thus, while orthodox Baptists would have undoubtedly shuttered at the thought of openly welcoming such peripheral groups as the Mormons to speak about their version of the gospel, Orr was sympathetic to them. Orr's intentions are well-documented: they are narrated by witnesses in an 1841 episode in which he defended the right of a visiting Mormon to speak at a public meetinghouse, and an 1843 letter to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, by Orr himself. Orr's evolving theology challenges us to see him as a more nuanced individual than traditional narratives make him out to be, and helps us acknowledge and appreciate the nuances of local, state, and national religious history as well.

In September, 1857, one of the worst tragedies in the history of the Westward Expansion took place at Mountain Meadows in southwest Utah Territory. John D. Lee, on the orders of his leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, lead approximately fifty Mormon priesthood holders and a few Paiute allies to massacre 120+ men, women, and children. Events like this do not happen in a vacuum. Utilizing both LDS and non-LDS sources and historians, Matt McCune examines some of the contributing causes of this tragedy. He examines a combination of religious, political, and economic circumstances that came together to create conditions that resulted in poor, and frequently persecuted, Mormons attacking a wealthy and well equipped non-Mormon wagon train attempting to pass peacefully through their territory on the way to California.

Latino migration to the US South is not a new phenomenon. Claims of a "Nuevo New South " are thus products of the scholarly and popular imaginations rather than the historical record. Indeed, the claim of a rupture with the past has the potential to obscure the fact that contemporary relationships of race and class have their roots in the dilemmas that have confronted white and black Southerners since Emancipation. If the times and places of " the New South " meant something different to African Americans than it did to white observers and boosters, what have the times and places of the " Nuevo " South meant to Latino immigrants? Do those meanings, in fact, originate in a novel globalizing moment at the turn of the twenty-first century? And how can teasing out Latino immigrants' own narratives about the region help social scientists and historians find more appropriate ways of conceptualizing Latino immigration's meaning for the South as a whole?

The concept of social memory has generated a large literature, much of which focuses on the trauma of collective violence. Yet we need to know more about how narratives of violent and traumatic events influence social loyalties and how such narratives are managed or manipulated. Here we focus on the 1857 Mountain Meadows massacre, in which some 120 Arkansas emigrants were murdered in southwestern Utah. Our aim is not to establish "what really happened" at Mountain Meadows, but to examine the memory politics of the case-the many stories of the massacre, the ways they have been told, and their use as reference points in drawing or redrawing social boundaries. Our analysis highlights the activities of schoolteachers and other rural intellectuals in shaping the trauma process. This process, we argue, is based on an expanding sense of victimization as communicated in narratives of social violence and suffering.

This year, 2020, marks the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Camp Petit Jean on Petit Jean Mountain, Arkansas, by the Young Men's Christian Association.  Though it only lasted 20 years, the camp left an indelible mark on the Mountain and Community.

A narrative of the Bagley-Ridgeway Feud that took place at Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, from 1905 to 1915. Stemming from the death of Ed Bagley at the hands of City Marshal Lee Ridgeway, the eventual tally of seven murders and associated trials strained the Lawrence County legal system and divided public opinion. Featuring courtroom outbursts, midnight assassins, Pinkerton detectives, threats of lynching, and a same-day burial of father and son at nearby Mt. Zion Cemetery, this feud was as dramatic as they come.

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My book, Country Boy, examines the historical roots of Johnny Cash's music, emphasizing the importance of family, faith, history, and place in the singer's life and career. The book takes a narrative approach to Cash's life, but it is not a traditional biography. Using rare archival sources, the book examines Cash's upbringing in northeastern Arkansas and how it affected his lifelong views of music, religion, politics, and prison reform. "Country Boy" was one of the first songs Cash ever recorded, as well as one of his last. Throughout his career, Cash was a man who always tried to stay close to his roots. This book tells that story.

Ray Cash, depicted as the villain of the 2005 biopic Walk the Line, is the most controversial figure in the Cash family. But what did Johnny think of his father? This paper, which was given as a talk at the Johnny Cash Heritage Festival in Dyess, Arkansas, in October 2017, examines how Johnny's pubic views of his father changed dramatically over time. It also gives a brief overview of Ray Cash's life and how he affected Johnny's life and music.

This report presents the first paleoethnobotanical analysis of flotation samples from any site of the late prehistoric and protohistoric Greenbrier phase of Arkansas’s middle White River. Sample contexts include a burned structure, superimposed midden, midden outside of, but near the structure, and midden beneath the floor of the structure. Radiocarbon assays place construction of the structure during the Late Mississippian or Protohistoric Periods, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, or early seventeenth centuries. The light and heavy fractions of 17 samples included several categories of charred plant remains including domesticated food sources (corn, beans, and squash), wild food sources (nuts, persimmon, and grape), potentially cultivated or encouraged grasses, weeds, and construction materials. Data presented here support a generalized Mississippian subsistence pattern at the site, combining use of domesticated and wild plant foods. In addition, comparison with data produced by other investigators is used to assess the variation in subsistence strategies pursued by populations of the region during the late prehistoric period.

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This chapter addresses Arkansas's notable quartz crystals, discussing geology, locations, history, and use.  In addition, a broader history of uses, legends, and superstitions are explained.

This chapter was written in connection with Crystal Bridges Museum of Art's exhibit, Crystals in Art: Ancient and Modern. Crystals in Art is the first exhibition of its kind to explore the complex and varied connections between crystal and art throughout the world, spanning history, and geography.  (ISBN: 978-1-68226-111-8)

The Civil War in Arkansas endures as an example of conflict in the United States where boundaries between Union and Confederate, military and civilian, disappeared. Archaeological investigations of period sites here must reflect the changes in identity and the balances of social and political capital created by conflict in areas little toughed by actual fighting. Archaeological investigations of the Red River crossing of Dooley's Ferry focus on the place this site had within the context of Arkansas's Civil War history. One of the few low-water crossing poings on the Red River, Dooley's Ferry was a point of transshipment for goods, a temporary campsite for soldiers headed to the front, and a forified barrier against African-Americans fleeing slavery in the mid-South. By interpreting the site through the lens of conflict, we open conflict archaeology to new areas of research and increase our epistemological overlap with other sub-disciplines within archaeology and anthropology

In early America, the notion that settlers ought to receive undeveloped
land for free was enormously popular among the rural
poor and social reformers. Well into the Jacksonian era, however,
Congress considered the demand fiscally and economically
irresponsible. Increasingly, this led proponents to cast the idea as
a military matter: Land grantees would supplant troops in the efforts
to take the continent over from Indian nations and rival colonial
powers. Julius Wilm’s book examines the free land debates
of the 1790s to 1850s and reconstructs the settlement experiences
under the donation laws for Florida (1842) and the Oregon Territory
(1850).

Excavations at two archaeological sites in
the Southeast have yielded "snapshots" of
the material remains of the Hernando de
Soto expedition and the entrada's effects
on local populations. In Florida, the Tatham
Mound is an aboriginal burial mound that
contained evidence of both violent and
nonviolent contact as they passed through
in 1539 and two smaller contacts in 1540. In
Arkansas, Parkin is a Mississippian village
that was contacted in 1541, after they had
been traveling for two years. The two sites
are good examples of assemblages that can
be expected along different parts of the
expedition route.

What happened at Elaine? This question has two different, but interrelated, meanings. First, there is the question of the order of events, cause and effect, exactly who did exactly what and why-everything the historian hopes to uncover. However, this question can also relate to how this particular occurrence of racial violence should be classified as a social event. Reporting at the time tended to use the term "riot" or "race riot" to describe what happened at Elaine, and some of the earliest historical analyses followed suit, as with Bessie Ferguson's 1927 master's thesis, titled simply "The Elaine Race Riot." 1 Such descriptions were employed by newspapers to signify ostensible revolts against white authority-suspected "insurrections" or "uprisings"-but scholarship has long rejected such one-sided views while retaining the terminology as a useful shorthand for such large-scale violence. Historian Grif Stockley, in 2001, employed the term "massacre" to describe what happened at Elaine, and this term has since caught on, especially among those who wish to emphasize the one-sided nature of the violence-by whites,