January 17, 2014

Walter Lee Brown, who helped shape the discipline of Arkansas history as he oversaw the daily operations of the Arkansas Historical Association, died at the age of eighty-nine. Brown joined the history department at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1954, where he worked until he retired in 1990. Brown’s contributions as the editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly transitioned the journal from an eclectic mix that included some serious scholarship into a fully scholarly journal that kept abreast of changing perspectives and methods in the discipline. The AHQ would publish some of the earliest works on Arkansas’s African American, civil rights, and working-class history.