Arkansas: A History

South and West, delta and mountains, black and white, rich and poor, Arkansas is a complex state whose history has not been widely understood. In this graceful and good-humored account, author Harry S. Ashmore takes us on an instructive journey over the state's fascinating terrain and offers important new insights into Arkansas's historical character. 

Arkansas lies west of the Mississippi River and has shared much with that vast western region. Yet it also joined the Confederate States of America and has prided itself on its southern heritage. In the early nineteenth century, Arkansas was little removed from its wilderness beginnings, but the Indians who first made its hills and forests their home soon learned that the white man's frontier meant their demise. Later in the antebellum era, the young state searched for a sense of identity, covering with a patina of gentility the energy and violence that was characteristic of frontier America. The Civil War and Reconstruction brought both suffering and freedom and for the future left a mixed legacy. In the last hundred years, Arkansans struggled with old problems in a new context--race, cotton, sharecropping, and a colonial economy--and they discovered anew the need for hard work and good faith. On rich delta plantations and spare upland farms, in small towns and in cities like Little Rock and Fort Smith, the plain people of this state applied themselves to the pursuit of prosperity and hoped for a richer near future for their children.