Arkansas History

A new version of this paper is available.  See African American Legislators in the Arkansas General Assembly, 1868-1893: Another Look in
A Confused and Confusing Affair: Arkansas and Reconstruction, ed. by Mark Christ (Little Rock, AR: Butler Center Books, 2018).

This articles examines the interplay of the bracero program, labor movements, and civil rights in the United States, especially in the eastern Arkansas, 1940s-1960s. It argues that Mexican policies influenced the debates over civil rights and labor in the United States. It also explores  congressman Ezekial "Took" Gathings's work to continue the bracero program while fighting against civil rights for African Americans in the name of limited government, a contradictory stance that helped fuel criticism of Dixie Democrats, the bracero program, and the small-government argument against civil rights legislation.

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)

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).

Most archeologists agree that the Parkin site (3CS29) is the village of Casqui described in the chronicles of the Hernando de Soto expedition. When the Spaniards
visited in 1541, one of the things they did was raise a cross atop the platform mound
where the chief’s house stood. In 1966, archeologists found what they suggested was the base of this cross in a looter’s pit. Additional research in the early 1990s revealed that the post was made of bald cypress that was radiocarbon dated between 1515 and 1663. In April of 2016, we carried out excavations to further
investigate this feature. Six additional radiocarbon dates supported the earlier results. Efforts to obtain a date from dendrochronology were unsuccessful due to incomplete preservation of the outer growth rings. Nevertheless, the evidence supports its identification as part of the cross erected at Casqui.

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.