Author: awelky - Starting with A

We are near the end of another year affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, and we’re taking stock of the work we’ve done at both the CALS Roberts Library and the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas to document this crisis for future generations. Just as we have the chance to learn from soldiers’ and others’ wartime experiences due to the work of the journalists and photographers who captured that history in real time and the archivists and historians who preserved it, we want to offer that same chance to future students of history. To paraphrase the popular musical Hamilton, “history has its eyes on us” during this unprecedented time. As one of a number of recent community history projects, the Roberts Library/Butler …

Do you have the right to write for the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas? I’ve had occasion recently to visit with some of the people who were on the ground floor of creating the Encyclopedia of Arkansas in the early 2000s (I did not join the staff until 2005). Amid general discussion about what they envisioned for the EOA, and how it all ended up, I learned about a debate that preceded my arrival—a debate about who should be allowed to write for the EOA. One of the first things founding editor Tom Dillard and others did to lay the groundwork was establish separate oversight and editorial boards in order to rope in a range of Arkansas history experts to help …

The history community is like an ecosystem, with its various parts drawing energy and nutrition from other areas and, in turn, contributing energy and nutrition to other parts in ways that might not be immediately perceptible. This is a reality that confronts me nearly every day. You see, the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas does not exist, could not exist, absent the presence of numerous other institutions, such as local historical societies, university and college archives, public libraries, the Arkansas Historical Association, and many more. If the EOA were an organism, we might be one of those creatures on the seafloor, waiting patiently for the remains of fish and whales to drift their way. But that’s not really the best analogy, …