Arkansas History

A red ocher pictograph on Petit Jean Mountain in west central Arkansas appears to depict a Spanish ship of the European contact era.  Due to the absence of records documenting a Spanish seagoing vessel in the area and the high probability that the de Soto entrada passed nearby, the painting may have been produced in the 1540s by one of the enslaved Native Americans de Soto captured in Florida at the outset of the expedition, one who saw Spanish ships and may have been pressed into service unloading them.

The Dixie Frontier is the land west of the Appalachian Mountains , south of the Ohio River, and including both banks of the Mississippi River. It was settled by migrants from eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, people coming down the Ohio River on flatboats, and migrants, and the second sons from the Lowland South who could not inherit their family plantations. The culture Ozark Mountains in southern Missouri and northwest Arkansas developed from Appalachian Mountain people. President Andrew Jackson from Nashville became a symbol of the frontiersman even though he was a wealthy planter who owned slaves and removed Native Americans to the Indian Territory west of Arkansas. His political opponent in the Whig party was David Crockett also from Tennessee who used the popular media to become a similar folk hero. Missouri became a slave state under the Missouri Compromise of 1820 in an attempt to balance the number of slave and free states.

Mark Twain described his life on the Mississippi River as a pilot and depicts the river as a place of freedom for the fictional escaped slave Jim and Huck Finn. Solomon Northrup describes a Louisiana sugar plantation, and Henry Bibb tells about his repeated attempts to cross the Ohio River to free himself and his family.

After the election of Abraham Lincoln, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy under Mississippi native Jefferson Davis. Kentucky and Missouri remained in the Union as slave-owning border states. Two major battles in the so-called Western theater were the Union victories at Shiloh, Tennessee and Vicksburg, Mississippi.  General Nathan Bedford Forrest commanded Confederate troops who massacred freed slaves who fought at Fort Pillow and already had surrendered. After the war Forrest became the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and an equestrian statue of him was erected in 1901 in Memphis, Tennessee, which has recently been removed.

This project is a landscape study that examines how different members of the antebellum and postbellum community in Arkansas and Louisiana perceived and used the swamplands, and how this changed over time. This project suggests that the swamps played an absolutely crucial role for individual slaves and free blacks both before and after the Civil War. Unlike Europeans and the white community who viewed the swamps as static, physical spaces on the plantation without value, African-Americans viewed them as fluid places filled with value. Religious practices were often performed near swamps, and even so-called aberrant religions practices, like voodoo, happened in the swamps. Slaves and free African-Americans contributed to a small slave-based economy by trading and selling items from the swamps, such as moss, hides, and nuts. After the Civil War, freed African-Americans garnered more economic stability by buying swamplands and exploiting their rich, fertile nature and planting crops. The swamps offered slaves spaces to perform small, everyday acts of resistance, which did not completely undermine planter control, but helped to did help to contribute to an African American culture and enabled them to enrich their everyday lives, despite their status as enslaved.

Henry Jacobi was an emigrant from Zurich Switzerland, who, like many ethnic Germans living in Little Rock, Arkansas, was quietly pro-Union. Before the Civil War, he had become acquainted with "Charlotte," an enslaved woman who was sometimes sent to Jacobi's downtown store to buy items.  One day in August 1863, Jacobi ran into "Charlotte" and warned her that her owner was preparing to move her and the other slaves she owned to Texas, fearing that Union forces would soon take over Little Rock. Jacobi suggested Charlotte escape from her owner and offered to help her hide until the Union Army arrived in the city. She did so, joined by six fellow slaves, and hid in woods near Jacobi's house on the edge of the city. At some risk to himself, Jacobi fed them and provided necessities for survival.  When the Union army took the city on September 10, 1863, Charlotte and her compatriots were out of danger and had escaped slavery. She either took Edwards as her last name or married a man with that last name and one cemetery record suggests she lived until 1909.

This paper tells the story of Philipp Dietzgen (1838-1920), a German immigrant who in 1880 bought the Arkansas Staats-Zeitung, a German-language newspaper published in Little Rock. He was its owner, editor, and publisher until he sold it in 1895. From 1890 to early 1894, Dietzgen created endless troubles for the owners of a rival paper, Das Arkansas Echo, in its planning stages and after it first appeared at the end of 1891. His actions ranged from the unsavory to the unhinged, sometimes even straying into the illegal. He ended most of his attacks on the Echo owners in 1884, as he turned his attention to Kansas City, where he was acquiring two German-language newspapers. After he arrived in that city in 1895, he soon engaged in nasty battles with his employees, his business partners, and the editor of a rival newspaper, again sometimes behaving reprehensibly. However, by 1900 his battles were over and no others arose, at least publicly, before he died in 1920.

Arkansas did not have a German-language newspaper in 1877 when thirty-two-year-old Wilhelm (William) Fischer moved from St. Louis to Little Rock, Arkansas, to start one. He was joined in the enterprise by his sixteen-year-old brother Adolf (Adolph), a recently arrived immigrant. Together the brothers produced the first issue the Arkansas Staats-Zeitung in December and continued publishing it until William sold the newspaper in 1880. Subsequent owners published the paper until 1917. The remarkable aspect of the story of the newspaper's founders is that both William and Adolph played a major role in a momentous Gilded Age labor event. William, a socialist, was a leader of the 1877 Great Strike in St. Louis, and Adolph, a "communistic anarchist," helped organize a May 1886 labor rally at Chicago's Haymarket where a thrown bomb killed and injured policemen. He was executed for his alleged role in the bombing.

In November 1870, Frederick Kramer of the first ward and Asa Richmond of the third ward ran for re-election to the Little Rock city council. Both were supported by the regular Republicans (the "minstrels") a faction headed by Governor Powell Clayton but were opposed by the anti-Claton reform Republicans (the "brindletails") because they stood in the way of that faction's control of the council. To remove Kramer from the council, Little Rock mayor A. K. Hartman, a brindletail leader, helped carry out a plot to usurp the Ward 1 polling place, replacing the regular election judges and ballot box with their own. The plot's results were not what Hartman or the other brindletails expected.

This paper tells the story of Frederick Kramer, the Republican Party's nominee for Little Rock mayor in November 1873, who was elected and held office for seventeen months. Kramer, a German immigrant, took office a few months after the front end of the 1873 Depression had hit the city, and it struggled to pay the salaries of its employees and lacked funds to fix even the worst street and other problems. The city's financial plight was complicated by the Brook-Baxter conflict in May 1874, which clogged the city streets with armed men ready to fight for the side they supported. This conflict led to the end of Reconstruction, a new state constitution, and the election in April 1875 of the Democratic Party candidate for mayor and most of its candidates for the city council By the time of that election, Kramer had switched parties, even though the Republican Party had nominated him for reelection.

Little Rock's first Turnverein (Turner Society) was created in October 1867 when a few ethnic German immigrants decided their numbers had grown large enough to support this popular gymnastics-cum-intellectual development organization. Despite obstacles that limited its membership, the organization provided gymnastics training and group exercises for young German-speaking men at its Turner Hall and sponsored numerous social activities. Its programs nourished the rise of an active community of German speakers in post-Civil War Little Rock, enabling them to regain elements of the culture lost when emigrating and reducing the isolation of newly arrived immigrants. However, after less than seven years of operations, the Turnverein was forced to shut down by an economic depression and political controversies that reduced its membership rolls.

The five extended families and one individual who emigrated from Asch in German Bohemia to Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1850s, prospered after the end of the Civil War. The most successful became grocers and later in life, bankers. In 1872, four immigrants from Asch and three husbands of Asch immigrants owned or co-owned five grocery stores located within three blocks of each. Another Asch husband owned a grocery store a few blocks away. One of the stores was purchased by an Asch immigrant who turned it into one of the largest wholesale grocery stores in the state. The most successful grocers were Charles Penzel, Frederick Kramer, George Reichardt, and John E. Geyer.  Other Asch immigrants and husbands did well as skilled tradesmen, farmers, and saloon owners. One saloon owner, John M. "Papa" Geyer became especially well known for his beer garden and the many balls held there and in his hall.

By the time the Civil War started in 1861, the emigrants from Asch had settled into their new homeland and had good reason to be optimistic about their futures in Little Rock and Pulaski County, Arkansas. The outbreak of the war threatened to disrupt, perhaps even destroy, all they had achieved in the United States, and they were forced to choose a side in the war, with the likelihood that they would not fare well if they openly backed the Union cause. Two Asch immigrants joined the Confederate army, with one being badly wounded in battle. One Asch immigrant served in a local militia. The spouse of one served in the army and three other spouses provided some service to the Southern forces. Two men born in Asch joined the Union Army, as did the future husband of an Asch immigrant. Although opinions about the war were mixed among the Asch families and their spouses, it appears that many of them quietly favored the Northern cause.

This text explores the characteristics of the paintings that make up my thesis show, In the Pines, in which each image bristles with narrative aspects and hints of everyday magic. In this document, I discuss my obsession with storytelling while introducing the overarching themes
that mark my work. Also, I illuminate the influences, both Contemporary and Historical, that have stirred my creative energies: forces that are both familiar and strange that drive the work’s subject matter, content, and materiality.
For generations, my family has spun their stories in the Ouachita National Forest in western Arkansas. My paintings for In the Pines focus on these stories and the particular landscape that has nurtured them. I also touch upon developing my style, which I have dubbed ‘Magical Regionalism,’ in which Regionalism and Magical Realism entwine.

Keywords: Magical Regionalism, Regionalism, Magical Realism, fairy tales, mythology,
narrative paintings, storytelling, heritage, Arkansas, Ouachita National Forest

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From 1848 to 1861, at least twenty-eight German speakers living in Asch, Bohemia, emigrated to Little Rock, Arkansas, and three more arrived after the Civil War. Most of these Asch immigrants came from three large, well-educated families, and their arrival boosted the number of Germans in the city by over twenty percent. This paper discusses who the immigrants were, why they immigrated, and how they adjusted to new lives in a small Southern city in which only a small fraction of the population was born outside the United States. This paper won the Arkansas Historical Association's award for the "Best Family History" published in 2020 in a county or local historical journal.

A struggle for control of the Little Rock city council resulted in the eight-member body reaching an impasse when trying to elect the president of the council, a position that had taken on importance after the suspension of the city's mayor. The split was between the Radical Republicans, known as the minstrels, and the Liberal Republicans called the brindletails. The split ended after 701 votes that ended in a tie, thanks to a deft move by Frederick Kramer, who aligned with the minstrels, He was able to use a technicality to gain the position of president of the council.

Do natural disasters help or hurt politicians’ electoral fortunes? Research on this question has produced conflicting results. Achen and Bartels (2002, 2016) find that voters punish incumbent politicians indiscriminately after such disasters. Other studies find that voters incorporate the quality of relief efforts by elected officials. We argue that results in this literature may be driven, in part, by a focus on contemporary cases of disaster and relief. In contrast, we study a case of catastrophic flooding in the American South in 1927, in which disaster aid was broadly and fairly distributed and Herbert Hoover (the 1928 Republican presidential candidate) was personally responsible for overseeing the relief efforts. Despite the distribution of unprecedented levels of disaster aid, we find that voters punished Hoover at the polls: in affected counties, Hoover’s vote share decreased by more than 10 percentage points. Our results are robust to the use of synthetic control methods and...

  The Civilian Conservation Corps, a Depression-era federal program founded in 1933 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, provides a unique example of a successful partnership-based government program. The CCC provided a win-win solution linking the needs of families experiencing poverty and unemployment with innovative approaches to land restoration. The young men who enrolled in the camps helped to restore natural resources, build roads and park structures, fight fires, and plant trees. They worked hard for their earnings, building confidence and self-respect, and matured from boys to men. This is a review of the documentary film Camp Forgotten: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Michigan, and the historical novel Big Shoulders, both by Bill Jamerson.  

In March 1864, Union forces began their fifth attempt to invade Texas in less than fifteen months. The commander of the Union Department of the Gulf, based in New Orleans, was Major General Nathaniel Prentiss Banks. With aspirations for the presidency. Banks was at that time arguably more popular than Abraham Lincoln. He needed a stunning, or at least a well publicized, victory to vault him into office. The Union Navy had failed at Galveston Bay on New Year's Day, 1863.' Banks' 19th Corps commander. Major General William Buet Franklin, had failed miserably at Sabine Pass on September 8, 1863 and^ again in October and November during the Texas Overland Expedition.' The fourth attempt at least landed troops on Texas soil, this time on the barrier islands along the coast and at Brownsville during November 1863, but no meaningful attempt was made to strike inland.'' The fifth expedition was the Red River Campaign, resulting in the largest combined arms operation ...

New drama in the western theatre Unit fought in Vicksburg, Red River, and Camden campaigns Thomas Reid\u27s Spartan Band: Burnett\u27s 13th Texas Cavalry in the Civil War is a splendidly crafted account of an East Texas cavalry regiment formed in 1862. Like many Texas cavalry un...

Confederate army had long odds Could Hood\u27s gamble have paid off? Nashville: The Western Confederacy\u27s Final Gamble serves as the capstone of James Lee McDonough\u27s chronicles dealing with Tennessee\u27s major Civil War battles. McDonough, a Nashville native and Civil War sch...

The Arkansas River molded the history of Arkansas. It also shaped human to human interactions and human relationships with the physical environment. Since humans first encountered the river their lives have been influenced by it. The river played a significant role in creating the environmental conditions that contributed to a specific existence within the river valley. It affected what types of flora and fauna existed, the quality of the soil, and the climate. The river was a vital component in the evolution of the cultures and societies that developed in the river valley. Conversely, humans affected the river. The ways humans perceived and used the river impacted the physical characteristics that defined the river. Ever since the first humans interacted with the river there has been a dialectic relationship put into motion, a cycle of constant change where humans and the environment renegotiated their understandings and relationship with one another. Throughout every time period o...

This study examines the organic emergence and evolution of discernible patterns in the tactical behavior of Major General William T. Sherman's Fifteenth Army Corps of the Army of the Tennessee across its first year operating within the western theater of the American Civil War. It analyzes the ways in which specific experiences and patterns of meaning-making within the corps's regiments and batteries led to the emergence of a distinctive corps-level "tactical culture." This concept, introduced for the first time within the dissertation, is defined as a collection of shared, historically-derived, normative ideas, beliefs, assumptions, and habitual behaviors that inform a subordinate military command's particular approach to the prosecution of its assigned objectives on or off the battlefield. The dissertation employs the research methodologies of "new military history" to inform an older "traditional" historiography in an effort to frame what...

In 1268 cardinals descended upon the medieval village of Viterbo to choose a successor for Pope Clement IV. For two years and eight months the cardinals stayed in the palace while the village had to feed and care for them. The end of the process arrived only when the people of the village could no longer afford to provide for the cardinals. It finally took starving them and removing the roof of the building to convince them that a decision had to be made. This extravagant behavior provides an example of the deep-seeded domination of, in this case, the Catholic Church: the ability to bring a village to its knees without concern illustrates a disconnection between the institution and The Word. The modern Christian organization still sits astride a developmental gulf between the church as described in the bible and the contingent realities of the institution itself. The bible describes a religious organization as hierarchical with a flat structure, impecunious, humble and mobile. The c...