Race and Ethnicity: Does not Apply

AARP Arkansas

With its state headquarters in Little Rock (Pulaski County), AARP Arkansas is affiliated with the national organization formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons. In 1999, the 501(c)(4) organization officially changed its name simply to the initials AARP, recognizing that many of its members continue to work full or part time. Arkansas AARP was formed in 2001. AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan interest group focusing on issues affecting people over age fifty. Membership includes a monthly general interest magazine and an informational bulletin that have two of the largest circulations in the United States. According to AARP, it is one of the strongest, most influential lobbying groups in America on both the state and federal levels, with its …

Act 346 of 2021

Act 346 of 2021, titled “An Act to Prohibit the Performance of a Pelvic Examination on an Unconscious or Anesthetized Patient without the Prior Consent of the Patient,” was passed during the regular session of the 2021 Arkansas General Assembly. The law included Arkansas in a growing number of states that had begun to outlaw a practice long used for the training of medical students. Before the early twenty-first century, conducting pelvic examinations upon women who were anesthetized was common practice in the training of medical students. Many women would not even be aware that they had undergone such an examination, as it would not show up on any hospital billing. However, changing cultural norms began to call this practice …

American Spa, The

The American Spa: Hot Springs, Arkansas is 1982 work of history written by Dee Brown, author of the bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and published by Rose Publishing Company of Little Rock (Pulaski County). The book was commissioned by the Arkansas Bank and Trust Company of Hot Springs (Garland County) for the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Hot Springs Reservation (now Hot Springs National Park). As Brown writes in his introduction, the short book is not the product of original research but is “based mainly upon research done by members of the Garland County Historical Society,” and it does not follow a chronological account but instead “is told by topics in hopes that a mixture of …

Americans for Immigration Moratorium (AIM)

Founded in Rogers (Benton County) in 1997, Americans for an Immigration Moratorium (AIM) was an organization that worked to influence a series of American immigration reforms. Founder Dan Morris sought increased regulations and additional scrutiny for both legal and illegal immigration due to what Morris referred to as a mass immigration to northwestern Arkansas throughout the 1990s. AIM’s primary goal was a complete halt to U.S. immigration for a five-year period. In 1988, Morris and his family relocated to Rogers from Albuquerque, New Mexico, looking to put down roots in the quiet yet prosperous area. During the 1990s, the northwestern Arkansas area had a high rate of employment coupled with an affordable cost of living, which positioned the region as …

Another Good Loving Blues

Another Good Loving Blues is a 1993 novel by African American writer Arthur Flowers, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and previously author of De Mojo Blues. The book is set in the Mississippi River Delta of eastern Arkansas, Memphis, and Mississippi. The novel begins with an invocation of the storyteller’s art: “I am Flowers of the delta clan Flowers and the line of O Killens—I am a hoodoo, I am griot, I am a man of power. My story is a true story, my words are true words, my lie is a true lie—a fine old delta tale about a mad blues piano player and an Arkansas conjure woman on a hoodoo mission.” The story begins in the spring of …

Another Kind of Love

Another Kind of Love is a 1983 romance novel written by Mary Lynn Baxter and published by Silhouette Books (which would be purchased by publisher Harlequin the following year). The book is part of the “Men Made in America” series, which encompasses fifty books by different authors featuring “red-blooded, white-hot, true-blue hunks from every State in the Union,” according to back-cover copy. Another Kind of Love is the volume devoted to Arkansas, drawing upon the experience of the author who, when young, would spend summers with her family along Norfork Lake. Other volumes in the series include Nobody’s Baby (Nevada) and All in the Family (West Virginia). Thirty-year-old Ali Cameron heads up Cameron Cosmetics in Manhattan. At the beginning of …

Antitrust Laws and Lawsuits (Progressive Era)

Antitrust laws and lawsuits against monopolistic corporations were major features of both state and national politics before World War I during the Progressive Era. Popular concern in Arkansas about corporate wrongdoing became part of third-party agrarian political agendas in the 1880s. The state’s Agricultural Wheel president, Lewis P. Featherstone, introduced an antitrust bill in the 1887 session of the Arkansas General Assembly aimed at the American Cotton Oil Trust. Antitrust measures in other states, especially in the Midwest, led the U.S. Congress to enact the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 to catch up with state lawmaking. However, an effective antitrust law was not adopted in Arkansas until 1899, only after agrarian concerns became shared by urban, middle-class citizens. During the …

Arkansas [Book and Movie]

The book Arkansas is a debut novel by John Brandon that was originally released in 2008 by McSweeney’s Publishing. It was praised by the San Francisco Chronicle in a review that compared Brandon’s style to that of Raymond Chandler, Flannery O’Connor, and Mark Twain. In 2018, Arkansas was produced as a movie. It was filmed by first-time director Clark Duke, who was born in Hot Springs (Garland County) and raised in Glenwood (Pike and Montgomery counties). In discussing the film, reviewers evoked auteur director Quentin Tarantino, the movie-making Coen Brothers, and Arkansas author Charles Portis, who was born in El Dorado (Union County). The movie was partially filmed in Arkansas, with locations in and around Hot Springs. The darkly comic …

Arkansas Civil Rights Heritage Trail

The Arkansas Civil Rights Heritage Trail is a walking tour in Little Rock (Pulaski County) that commemorates people and places that have played important roles in the state’s journey toward equal rights for all. A part of the United States Civil Rights Trail, the Arkansas trail was created by University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity to recognize “the sacrifices and achievements made by those who fought for racial and ethnic justice in Arkansas.” The trail also serves to raise awareness both for tourists and Arkansas residents of the important place of the civil rights legacy in the state’s history, the full extent of which is often overlooked. The several-blocks-long trail begins just outside the …

Arkansas Committee

In the spring of 1990, Mark Swaney, a graduate student in engineering at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), founded a campus organization called the Arkansas Committee. The organization was originally a discussion group that addressed several topics, including political assassinations in the 1960s and reports of alleged drug trafficking, gunrunning, and money laundering connected to the Mena Intermountain Municipal Airport in Mena (Polk County). Swaney was concerned about secret government operations and their threat to representative democracy. Later that year, the committee was recognized as a campus organization and was provided a room at the student union as a meeting and office space. The Arkansas Committee was especially interested in drug smuggler Barry Seal and the …

Arkansas Historical Quarterly

The Arkansas Historical Quarterly (AHQ) is the official publication of the Arkansas Historical Association (AHA), offering original research on Arkansas history subjects as well as relevant secondary resources. It is housed in the AHA offices in the history department of the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). The Arkansas Historical Association was organized in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on February 22, 1941. Its first project was “publication of a journal of state history.” David Yancey Thomas, one of the main proponents of creating the AHA, was its first editor. The first issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly was published in March 1942 and featured “a ‘Salutory,’ a ‘List of Charter Members,’ four leading articles, ten pages of ‘Documents,’ …

Arkansas Living Treasure Award

The Arkansas Living Treasure award is an annual recognition by the Arkansas Arts Council, an agency of the Division of Arkansas Heritage, that is presented to people who have mastered the traditional arts and crafts that exemplify the state. The award is intended to underscore the identity of Arkansas through its history and culture. It is presented for lifetime achievement in contributions to the field of traditional arts and crafts so that those skills may be passed along to future generations. The program began in 2002 and was expanded in 2021 to also include performing folk arts. Traditional crafts recognized through the Arkansas Living Treasure award program include basketweaving, blacksmithing, bladesmithing, cabin construction, knife-making, metalworking, pottery, quilting, textile work, weaving, …

Arkansas State Donation Law of 1840

On December 23, 1840, Arkansas’s governor Archibald Yell signed into law a statute with the cumbersome title of “An Act to Donate to Actual Settlers the Right of the State to Certain Forfeited Lands.” Despite its technical title, this law was enthusiastically received, being one of the first in U.S. history under which white Americans could claim free land if they turned the parcels into farms. Arkansas was able to offer this homesteading option more than twenty years before the passage of the federal Homestead Act of 1862 because it owned a large part of a military land tract between the St. Francis and Arkansas rivers that had been meant to remunerate soldiers of the War of 1812. Much land …

Belle of Texas [Steamboat]

The Belle of Texas was a steamboat running between Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Memphis, Tennessee, when it was pressed into service to transport followers of Elisha Baxter to fight in the 1874 Battle of New Gascony during the Brooks-Baxter War. The Belle of Texas was a sidewheel paddleboat built by James Rees and Sons in 1871 for service on the Trinity River in Texas, with the hull constructed in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, before being finished out at Pittsburgh. The steamer was 134 feet long and thirty-three feet wide with a five-foot draft. The Memphis and Arkansas River Packet Company soon purchased the vessel to run between the Arkansas capital and Memphis, with stops at landings in between. Captain John Woodburn …

Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town, The

Written by former Arkansas governor and U.S. senator Dale Bumpers, The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town is an autobiographical book that details not only his career as a politician but also how his upbringing in rural Franklin County shaped his outlook. Published in 2003 by Random House, the memoir received positive reviews and was later released in paperback by the University of Arkansas Press. Born in Charleston (Franklin County) on August 12, 1925, Dale Leon Bumpers was the son of William Bumpers and Lattie Jones Bumpers. His father worked at a combined local hardware store and funeral home during Bumpers’s early years before buying the business in 1937. His father also served one term in the Arkansas House of …

Big Dam Bridge

The Big Dam Bridge, which opened to the public in 2006, is a walking, running, and bicycling bridge constructed over the Murray Lock and Dam No. 7 of the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System. Designed and built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Southwestern Division, it attracts thousands of tourists and exercise enthusiasts to central Arkansas annually. It spans the Arkansas River to connect Little Rock (Pulaski County) and North Little Rock (Pulaski County). The Corps of Engineers managed the construction while not using corps monies; instead, it supervised local, state, and federal funds to build the bridge to connect exercise trails through the Arkansas River Trail and 70,000 acres of adjacent public parkland. Pulaski County Judge Floyd G. …

Boom Town

Boom Town: How Wal-Mart Transformed an All-American Town into an International Community is a 2009 nonfiction book by Marjorie Rosen, a journalist and professor at Lehman College–City University of New York. The book explores the population growth and demographic transformation of Bentonville (Benton County), and some other nearby communities, due to the presence of the headquarters of Walmart, which had become the world’s largest retailer.   Rosen opens her book by recounting the experience of Coleman Peterson, an African American man hired as the head of human resources by Walmart in 1994. He arrived in Bentonville in time to witness a rally of the Ku Klux Klan. This experience provides a narrative hook whereby Rosen can begin to outline the racial …

Brinkley Tornado of 1909

aka: Brinkley Cyclone
aka: Tornado Outbreak of March 8, 1909
Thirty-five people were killed and most of the town of Brinkley (Monroe County) was destroyed by a March 8, 1909, tornado, one of a series that caused a total of fifty-eight fatalities along with damage in at least nine Arkansas counties. The tornado roared into Brinkley at 7:07 p.m. on March 8, 1909, and it was reported that wind that sounded like an explosion of dynamite scraped through the town, “as with a billion hands wrenched, tore and struck down, with hideous wails and terrible crunches.” It destroyed and damaged residential and commercial buildings, with the Brauda Dry Goods Company being the sole store in town that was untouched. St. John the Baptist Catholic Church was the only Brinkley church …

Broadside to the Sun

Broadside to the Sun is a 1946 book by Donald W. (Don) West recounting his family’s pursuit of subsistence farming in rural Washington County, Arkansas. West’s work was widely read in the northwestern Arkansas region and has become a valuable source for students of Ozarks farm ways and the impacts of twentieth-century social and economic change on the state. Published in 1946 by W. W. Norton & Company as part of its American Lives series, Broadside to the Sun was the first book published by West, an educator who had worked at the Museum of New Mexico. West’s account was part of a trend of books celebrating rural America and the uniqueness of the Ozarks region and culture. Although clearly …

Camden Expedition Sites National Historic Landmark

The Camden Expedition Sites National Historic Landmark (NHL) consists of nine battlefields, fortifications, and buildings that collectively embody a significant moment in American history. They were designated as NHLs on April 19, 1994—the first time an entire military campaign was so recognized. Following an expensive purchase of property to forestall private development of a portion of the Second Manassas battlefield in Virginia, U.S. Senator Dale Bumpers led an effort through which Congress created the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission in 1990 with a goal of identifying and assessing the conditions of 384 battlefields around the country. The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program (AHPP) conducted the fieldwork in Arkansas, examining a total of seventeen battlefields, including five that were associated with the …

Catholic Women’s Union of Arkansas

The Catholic Women’s Union of Arkansas was an auxiliary to the Catholic Union of Arkansas, an organization founded by German Catholic immigrants. Discussions began in 1917 to establish a separate women’s group, but the chapter could not be organized at Morrison Bluff (Logan County) until October 8, 1919, due to World War I. The first president was Theresia Wewers of Morrison Bluff, and the auxiliary immediately began holding joint annual conventions with the Catholic Union. The group was also affiliated with the National Catholic Women’s Union. A revised constitution adopted in 1938 stressed the non-political nature of the group, pledged dedication to the Catholic Church as well as the state and national constitutions, and vowed to work for social justice …

Cherry Pit, The

“Why have we come here to this water?” This question hangs over the protagonist, Clifford “Nub” Stone, throughout Donald Harington’s first novel, The Cherry Pit. Published in 1965 by Random House, PIT (as Harington liked to abbreviate it) tells the story of Clifford’s return to his hometown of Little Rock (Pulaski County), where he meets up with old friends, struggles to reconnect with his family, and, most of all, wonders what hold Arkansas’s capital might still exert over him even after he has made a successful life for himself in Boston as a curator of antiquities and an expert on what he refers to as the Vanished American Past. In Little Rock, Clifford reunites with three old friends who embody …

Chewaukla Mineral Springs Co.

The cold-water springs below the site of the bottling factory of Chewaukla Mineral Springs Co. (later the Sleepy Hollow Water Co.) outside Hot Springs (Garland County) became a national sensation, with backers from Chicago and an “expert” touting their “radioactive medicinal value.” Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians wrote a song dedicated to this “Sleepy Water of Hot Springs, Arkansas.” Radio programs and newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune disseminated testimonials of what the water could cure. The bottling factory was located on what is now Sleepy Valley Road off of Highway 7 South just north of Hot Springs proper and within Hot Springs National Park. In the twenty-first century, the remains of the facility are not marked by any …

Chicken War of 1962–1963

The Chicken War of 1962–1963 was a trade dispute between poultry producers in Arkansas and other states and the European Economic Community (EEC). In the late 1950s, Arkansas poultry producers began to market U.S. chicken in western Europe. In collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, M. H. “Bill” Simmons of Plus Poultry in Siloam Springs (Benton County) and other business leaders helped post–World War II Europeans develop their own poultry industry. Noting that Arkansas’s Benton County produced more chicken than some European nations, Simmons assumed it would be decades before European producers could compete with their American mentors. “There is a considerable movement of poultry from Northwest Arkansas into the export channels almost weekly,” Simmons wrote to U.S. Senator …

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves

Cicadas Sing of Summer Graves is a modern southern gothic novel with a heavy dose of magical realism. This debut novel published in 2023 was cowritten by Alexandra Cronin and Robyn Barrow under the pen name Quinn Connor. The story was inspired by Barrow’s childhood weekends spent on Lake Ouachita in Arkansas and Cronin’s family time spent on Cedar Creek Lake in Texas. As stated in the novel’s author’s note, “The town of Prosper was inspired by Buckville, Arkansas, which was flooded in the 1950s by the Blakely Mountain Dam and is now beneath Lake Ouachita. The upper Ouachita valley is a part of the homelands of the Indigenous Caddo Nation, which has been systematically displaced by settlers for hundreds …

City of Fort Smith v. Wade

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), one of the most significant governmental reform laws ever enacted by the Arkansas General Assembly, withstood many efforts in the state legislature and the courts to curtail the public’s right to know what state and local governments were doing. The efforts multiplied in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century. One such tactic that did succeed was a lawsuit, cited as City of Fort Smith v. Wade, in which the Arkansas Supreme Court altered the meaning of a public meeting so that private emails among city officials about an issue before the city board of directors did not violate the FOIA because the emails probably did not directly affect the city board’s …

Civil War Military Event Terminology

According to the National Park Service, there were more than 770 military activities in Arkansas between 1861 and 1865, ranging from relatively minor incursions into hostile territory to full-scale battles involving thousands of men. However, there are few if any sources detailing exactly what defines such things as an “action,” “affair,” or “engagement,” among other terms used for the military events of the Civil War. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies uses such terms as affair, expedition, and scout to describe various activities, but it does not include a definition of what those terms mean as to number of troops involved, duration, or similar considerations. Allen W. Jones and …

Coal Gap School

The Coal Gap School building is located in rural Benton County, approximately fifteen miles east of Rogers (Benton County). This is the third building in this location and sited near the two earlier sites. The origin of Coal Gap’s name is unknown, but it was possibly once known as Jennings Switch. The Coal Gap School was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 4, 1992, and is privately owned. Benton County records contain a list of school directors at the office of the county school supervisor’s office and state they were “elected by 1887,” indicating the first Coal Gap/Jennings Switch school’s existence at that time. Edmond L. Jennings received 160 acres on May 15, 1876, as part …

College Station (Pulaski County)

College Station, Genevia, and Bucktown are names used locally to identify the U.S. Census Designated Place located around Frazier Pike in Badgett Township in the southeastern area of Pulaski County. William Thompson and L. B. Porter produced a manuscript in 2009 that states the area was once called Motley Heights in the late 1890s and early 1900s, but different names for the area seem to have been used concurrently. The Arkansas Gazette, on August 23, 1908, advertised a “Big Republican Mass Meeting & Barbecue” in the College Park Addition, described as a beautiful suburb to Little Rock (Pulaski County). There were 400 lots to be sold at prices from $25 to $115. The location is described as a thirty-minute drive …

Come Again

Come Again is a 2018 graphic novel by writer-artist and North Little Rock (Pulaski County) native Nate Powell set in an “intentional community” (or commune) in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. The work explores themes of parenthood and secrets. Come Again opens in the “present day” of 1979 at Haven Station, a “little village” established in 1971 with ten “back-to-the-land” families; the community briefly grew to twenty-six and then shrank to eight. The village is described as located “just shy of the state line” and past a town named Hallelujah Springs, an apparent stand-in for Eureka Springs (Carroll County). The main characters are Haluska, a young woman of Russian Jewish extraction whose parents fled the Soviet Union, and her son, …

Come and Get It

Come and Get It, Kiley Reid’s second novel, delivers a penetrating study of American young adulthood. Reid was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Arizona, and she studied fiction writing at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Reid wrote Come and Get It while her partner was working at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), and most of the novel’s action follows undergraduates and a visiting professor as their fates collide on the Fayetteville campus. Published in 2024 by Putnam on the heels of a heralded debut novel, Such a Fun Age, Reid’s sophomore novel develops a coming-of-age story, featuring plenty of comic moments despite concluding in the aftermath of a traumatic incident. The novel earned …

Congressional Districts

The Arkansas delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives has been made up of four members since redistricting took place in the early 1960s. Since statehood in 1836, the total number of seats allotted to the state has fluctuated from one to seven. The boundaries of the districts continue to shift based on population growth or decline in certain portions of the state. The Arkansas Territory gained representation in the House in 1819 when delegate James Woodson Bates of Batesville (Independence County) took his seat in the Sixteenth Congress. Previously, what is now the state of Arkansas received representation from the delegates of the Louisiana Territory and later the Missouri Territory. With the Missouri Territory on schedule to enter the …

Continental Trailways Bus Hijacking of July 3, 1982

A young couple who believed they would be resurrected died in a murder-suicide on the Little Buffalo River Bridge at Jasper (Newton County) after hijacking a Continental Trailways bus on July 3, 1982. Former U.S. Marine Keith Haigler, age twenty-six, and his wife Kate Clark Haigler, twenty-four, were followers of a Newton County man named Emory Lamb who professed a belief called the Foundation of Ubiquity (FOU). They lived on his land a few miles from Jasper, where Kate Haigler worked at the Ozark Cafe. They became convinced that Lamb was the Messiah and believed that if they died and their bodies were brought to his home they would rise from the dead after three and a half days. The …

Conway Regional Airport

Opened in 2014, the Conway Regional Airport at Cantrell Field (CRA) is a growing city-owned general aviation airport. It is located in the Lollie Bottoms area of southwestern Conway (Faulkner County). CRA, which was named Arkansas’s Airport of the Year in 2015, is served by a 5,500-foot runway with a parallel taxiway and provides aircraft fueling, service, and hangaring. The terminal houses a classroom, a conference room, and a twenty-four-hour accessible pilots’ lounge equipped with showers, a sleeping area, vending machines, and internet access. In 2022, CRA’s takeoffs and landings totaled 15,061, representing a forty percent increase from 2021. CRA replaced the original Conway Municipal Airport, a small facility that was located on Sixth Street near the city’s downtown. The …

Couch-Marshall House

Located in Magnolia (Columbia County), the Couch-Marshall House is an example of what has become known as the Plain Traditional style of architecture, which in this instance took on characteristics of the Queen Anne Revival style. The “high style” of the Queen Anne Revival type of residence had become the preferred style of design and construction in Arkansas by 1880 and was to remain so until the beginning of the twentieth century. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places on July 24, 1992. The house takes part of its name from Thomas G. Couch, who was born in Columbia County on February 28, 1852, not long after his parents had relocated from their ancestral home in …