In Champion Trees of Arkansas, Linda Williams Palmer explores the state’s largest trees of their species, registered with the Arkansas Forestry Commission as “champions.” Through her beautiful colored-pencil drawings, each magnificent tree is interpreted through the lens of season, location, history, and human connection.
Readers will get to know the cherrybark oak, rendered in fall colors, an avatar for the passing of seasons. The sugar maple, with its bare limbs and weather-beaten trunk, stands sentry over the headstones in a confederate cemetery. The 350-year-old white oak was once dubbed the Council Oak by Native Americans, and the post oak, cared for by generations of the same family, has its own story to tell.
Palmer travelled from Delta swamps to Ozark and Ouachita mountain ridges over a seven-year period to see and document the champions and to talk with property owners and others willing to share the stories of how these trees are beloved and protected by the community, and often entwined with its history. Champion Trees of Arkansas is sure to inspire art and nature lovers everywhere.
Between 2011 and 2015, Arkansas commemorated the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War with re-enactments, lectures, placement of historical markers, and a wide variety of other events that were collectively attended by more than 375,000 people. While the sesquicentennial commemoration highlighted the Civil War events that occurred in the state and honored the people who experienced the war in Arkansas, the question of the war’s significance to modern Arkansas remained.
Competing Memories: The Legacy of Arkansas’s Civil War collects the proceedings of the final seminar sponsored by the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, which sought to define the lasting impact that the nation’s deadliest conflict had on the state by bringing together some of the state’s leading historians.
In these essays, Thomas A. DeBlack explores the post-war lives of both Union and Confederate soldiers who played prominent roles in Civil War Arkansas. Cherisse Jones-Branch delves into the lives of black Arkansans during the war and Reconstruction. Jeannie Whayne discusses the many ways the Civil War affected the state’s economic development, while Kelly Houston Jones investigates the Civil War’s impact on Arkansas women. Mary Jane Warde examines the devastating effects of the Civil War on Native Americans in Arkansas and the Indian Territory. Elliott West scrutinizes Civil War Arkansas from a continental perspective, and Carl Moneyhon considers the evolution of how we remember the Civil War.
Together, the essays in Competing Memories: The Legacy of Arkansas’s Civil War provide a compelling account of how America’s bloodiest war continues to affect Arkansas and its people today.Joseph M. Bailey’s memoir, Confederate Guerrilla, provides a unique perspective on the fighting that took place behind Union lines in Federal-occupied northwest Arkansas during and after the Civil War. This story—now published for the first time—will appeal to modern readers interested in the grassroots history of the Trans-Mississippi war. Bailey participated in the Battle of Pea Ridge and the siege of Port Hudson, eventually escaping to northwest Arkansas where he fought as a guerrilla against Federal troops and civilian unionists. After Federal forces gained control of the area, Bailey rejoined the Confederate army and continued in regular service in northeast Texas until the end of the war.
Historians will find the descriptions of military campaigns and the observations on guerrilla war especially valuable. According to Bailey, Southern guerrillas were motivated less by a sense of loyalty to either the Confederate or Union side than by a determination to protect their families and neighbors from the “Mountain Federals.” This partisan war waged between the rebel guerrillas and Southern Unionists was essentially a “struggle for supremacy and revenge.”
Comprehensive annotations are provided by editor T. Lindsay Baker to illuminate the clarity and reliability of Bailey’s late-life memoir.
Winner, 2023 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association
Because Johnny Cash cut his classic singles at Sun Records in Memphis and reigned for years as country royalty from his Nashville-area mansion, people tend to associate the Man in Black with Tennessee. But some of Cash’s best songs—including classics like “Pickin’ Time,” “Big River,” and “Five Feet High and Rising”—sprang from his youth in the sweltering cotton fields of northeastern Arkansas.
In Country Boy, Colin Woodward combines biography, history, and music criticism to illustrate how Cash’s experiences in Arkansas shaped his life and work. The grip of the Great Depression on Arkansas’s small farmers, the comforts and tragedies of family, and a bedrock of faith all lent his music the power and authenticity that so appealed to millions. Though Cash left Arkansas as an eighteen-year-old, he often returned to his home state, where he played some of his most memorable and personal concerts. Drawing upon the country legend’s songs and writings, as well as the accounts of family, fellow musicians, and chroniclers, Woodward reveals how the profound sincerity and empathy so central to Cash’s music depended on his maintaining a deep connection to his native Arkansas—a place that never left his soul.
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