Overview

African Americans
African Americans constitute 15.1 percent of Arkansas’s population, according to the 2020 census, and they h...
Agriculture
Agriculture has played a major role in Arkansas’s culture from territorial times, when farmers made up more ...
Arkansas's Regional Identity
Arkansas’s regional identity is a complex affair, given that the state overlaps the cultural and geographica...
Arts, Culture, and Entertainment
Arkansas’s cultural record may begin on the state’s eastern edge, with a painted buffalo skin made by the ...
Business, Commerce, and Industry
Business, commerce, and industry in Arkansas developed with the help of Arkansas’s natural resources. In the...
Civil War through Reconstruction, 1861 through 1874
In the last years of the 1850s, Arkansas enjoyed an economic boom that was unparalleled in its history. But in...
Divergent Prosperity and the Arc of Reform, 1968–2022
In November 2004, President George W. Bush joined former presidents George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter to spea...
Early Twentieth Century, 1901 through 1940
Arkansas faced a number of opportunities and challenges in the first four decades of the twentieth century. No...
Elementary and Secondary Education
Education has been evolving since the first humans arrived in Arkansas. By the late nineteenth century, as Ame...
Higher Education
Formal education above the high school level came to be known as higher education in the twentieth century. In...
Environment
Arkansas’s physical environment features a mild climate, adequate rainfall, a rural and relatively uncrowded...
European Exploration and Settlement, 1541 through 1802
The region that became Arkansas was unknown to Europeans until the 1540s. Fifty years after Christopher Columb...
Folklore and Folklife
When English antiquarian William J. Thoms introduced his new coinage “folk-lore” in 1846, he intended it a...
Food and Foodways
Because nutrition is essential to human survival, the production and consumption of food has been central to l...
Geography and Geology
Geography has played an important and continuing role in the history and culture of Arkansas. From settlement ...
Health and Medicine
Arkansas long had a reputation for being sickly because much of the state supported large mosquito populations...
Historic Preservation
Arkansas has an active preservation community with a notable success record in saving buildings, sites, and ne...
Law
Law develops out of the customs practiced by groups of people. In Arkansas, as in other places, the law has ev...
Literature and Authors
Arkansas’s place in Southern American literature is partly a result of its place on the map. The eastern bor...
Louisiana Purchase through Early Statehood, 1803 through 1860
A century of French and Spanish imperial control had little permanent effect on Arkansas, leaving it with fewe...
Mass Media
For a small state with regard to population and geography, Arkansas has a surprisingly large number of mass me...
Military
Arkansas’s military history began sometime after the first Paleoindian hunter-gatherers arrived. Territorial...
Native Americans
Arkansas was home to Native Americans long before Europeans arrived. The first explorers met Indians whose anc...
Politics and Government
“Arkansas,” its leading newspaper once lamented, “has too much politics.” But while the state has seen...
Post-Reconstruction through the Gilded Age, 1875 through 1900
In the years that followed Reconstruction, Arkansas experienced changes that paralleled trends taking place el...
Pre-European Exploration, Prehistory through 1540
The pre-European history of Arkansas begins 13,500 years ago in the Pleistocene epoch, when cold weather preva...
Recreation and Sports
Recreation and sports have long been vital to Arkansas. Recreation has been important in Arkansas since prehis...
Religion
The number of people in Arkansas who believe in and practice a religious faith has always been high, with the ...
Science and Technology
Arkansas has had a rather conflicted relationship with science and technology throughout its history. On the o...
Tourism
The term “tourism,” meaning “traveling as a recreation,” was not common in the nineteenth century, nor...
Transportation
The systems of conveyance both through and within Arkansas involve routes that include land, air, and water. B...
Women
From prehistoric times through the French and Spanish colonial eras, from the territorial period through state...