Arkansas History

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.

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?

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.

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm m aster. UMI films th e text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, w hile others may be from any type of computer printer. T h e q u a lity o f th is reprod uction is d e p en d e n t upon th e q u a lity o f th e co py su b m itted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignm ent can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. O versize materials (e .g ., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning a t the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps.

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.

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,

During the autumn of 2021, I conducted artifact analysis on three collections that were surface-collected from plowed fields surrounding the Lakeport Plantation (established in Chicot County, Arkansas in 1831) following the restoration of its "Big House" in the early 2000s. Many of these fields cover what were at one time activity areas of enslaved people and their descendants who lived and toiled on the land for over 100 years. This analysis represents an initial and preliminary step in a protracted archeological investigation of the area to locate such activity areas and their associated material culture on the surrounding landscape. In particular I focus on artifacts recovered from site 3CH200, which appears to represent a habitation area used during the plantation's earlier life under slaveowner and landowner Joel Johnson. Johnson owned and operated the plantation until his death in 1846 (DeBlack 1995:84), after which the land-and enslaved people passed to his son Lycurgus Johnson in the l 850s-when the still standing Greek Revival-style house was built.