BiblioVault - Books about Arkansas

The Land between the Rivers

Thomas Nuttall's Ascent of the Arkansas, 1819

Russell M. Lawson

University of Michigan Press, 2004

An adventure story from the wilds of early America, The Land between the Rivers recreates the journeys of the English botanist Thomas Nuttall, one of American history's most well-traveled scientists.

During the early nineteenth century, Nuttall explored the waters, valleys, plains, and mountains of the Great Lakes, Ohio River, Mississippi River, as well as the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, and Canadian river valleys of the former Louisiana Territory.

In this fascinating account of Nuttall's travels through the wilderness of the middle west, author Russell Lawson-using Nuttall's own journal-captures the sense of excitement of the early wanderer. As much a delight for the mind as the senses, The Land between the Rivers details the unremitting weather and rugged geography of uncharted lands within the Louisiana Territory. A sense of discovery pervades the narrative as Nuttall's odyssey builds to its climax in the prairie wilderness of what is now Oklahoma. Sickened by "ague"-in his case, malaria-Nuttall at times was barely able to go on; yet he continued to search for and catalog plants and animals.

The Land between the Rivers expands our knowledge of the work of one of the country's earliest botanists. We also learn a great deal about the early explorers, the inhabitants of the unsettled land, and about the land and culture of the times.

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Lessons from Little Rock

Terrance Roberts

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2009

Sober news reports of a U.S. Army convoy rumbling across the bridge into Little Rock cannot overpower this intimate, powerful, personal account of the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Showing what it felt like to be one of those nine students who wanted only a good high school education, Roberts’s rich narrative and candid voice take readers through that rocky year, helping us realize that the historic events of the Little Rock integration crisis happened to real people—to children, parents, our fellow citizens.

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A Life of Albert Pike

Walter Lee Brown

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

A Life of Albert Pike, originally published in 1997, is as much a study of antebellum Arkansas as it is a portrait of the former general. A native of Massachusetts, Pike settled in Arkansas Territory in 1832 after wandering the Great Plains of Texas and New Mexico for two years. In Arkansas he became a schoolteacher, newspaperman, lawyer, Whig leader, poet, Freemason, and Confederate general who championed secession and fought against Black suffrage. During his tenure as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite—a position he held for more than thirty years beginning in 1859—Pike popularized the Masonic movement in the American South and Far West. In the wake of the Civil War, Pike left Arkansas, ultimately settling in Washington, D.C., where he lived out his last years in the Mason's House of the Temple.

Drawing on original documents, Pike’s copious writings, and interviews with Pike’s descendants, Walter Lee Brown presents a fascinating personal history that also serves as a rich compendium of Arkansas’s antebellum history.

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Literacy as Conversation

Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities

Eli Goldblatt and David Jolliffe

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

In Literacy as Conversation, the authors tell stories of successful literacy learning outside of schools and inside communities, both within urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia and rural and semi-rural towns of Arkansas. They define literacy not as a basic skill but as a rich, broadly interactive human behavior: the ability to engage in a conversation carried on, framed by, or enriched through written symbols. Eli Goldblatt takes us to after-school literacy programs, community arts centers, and urban farms in the city of Philadelphia, while David Jolliffe explores learning in a Latinx youth theater troupe, a performance based on the words of men on death row, and long-term cooperation with a rural health care provider in Arkansas. As different as urban and rural settings can be—and as beset as they both are with the challenges of historical racism and economic discrimination—the authors see much to encourage both geographical communities to fight for positive change.

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A Little Rock Boyhood

Growing Up in the Great Depression

A. Cleveland Harrison

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2010

History books provide the statistics and the “big picture” of the Great Depression, but what did any of that mean for a family just trying to make it through those years? A. Cleveland Harrison’s A Little Rock Boyhood provides that viewpoint in this evocative memoir as he captures what Little Rock was like for him as a child in the 1930s. The Harrison family’s experiences and those of their extended family and neighbors bring the tough economic times down to the individual level. The youngest Harrison is an able reporter, relating the memories of an observant though naive child. All was not grim, though, if you were a kid, and Harrison describes those happy times. He remembers his life in the residential neighborhoods of downtown Little Rock when a child could grow up in difficult times without becoming difficult. This book is an insightful look back at a time, a place, and a childhood.

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Looking for Hogeye

Roy Reed

University of Arkansas Press, 1986

In that always compelling yet simple style that has made Roy Reed one of the country’s foremost journalists, he shows us—as we share with him delightful moments and rich insights on the way to Hogeye—Southerners still different for being Southerners, and country Southerners who are even more so, pained by bruises and comforted by salves that are peculiarly their own.

“I hope that my city friends will not be upset to learn that this book is a little more sympathetic to the Arkansas hill people than it is to New Yorkers,” he says. “I have grown attached to cities over the years, but I am still, somewhere near my heart, a hillbilly. I have gone to a lot of trouble to remember that.”

This book is a special admission into those hills, to Vacation Bible School, tent meetings, sale barns, back roads and pool halls, to dog days in Hogeye.

To read Looking for Hogeye is to sit with Roy Reed on his wide front porch as he tells by the life he lives why, after Washington, London, and New York, he made his home in the north Arkansas hills, where he felt—as he puts it—”like Brer Rabbit reentering the briar patch.”

It is a visit not to be missed, and not to be forgotten.

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The Lost Roads Project

A Walk-in Book of Arkansas

C.D. Wright

University of Arkansas Press, 1994

Poet C. D. Wright and photographer Deborah Luster have compiled a literary map of Arkansas and an unparalleled guidebook to its writers and the surroundings. Produced for "The Lost Roads Project," a walk-in exhibit of Arkansas as a state of letters, this map and catalog document the most significant places and authors in Arkansas's literary history. The Guidebook is replete with photographs, biographies, excerpts from novels and stories, poetry collections, and memoirs. With over 150 writers listed, the Reader's Map includes poets, country and blues songwriters, short fiction writers, novelists, historians, folklorists, and humorists. Each entry lists the author's life span, genre of work, birthplace, and bibliography.

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Loyalty on the Frontier

Sketches of Union Men of the South-West with Incidents and Adventures in Rebellion on the Border

A.W. Bishop

University of Arkansas Press, 2003

First published in 1863, this book has the immediacy, passion, and intimacy of its wartime context. It tells the remarkable story of Albert Webb Bishop, a New York lawyer turned Union soldier, who in 1862 accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel in a regiment of Ozark mountaineers. While maintaining Union control of northwest Arkansas, he collected stories of the social coercion, political secession, and brutal terrorism that scarred the region.

His larger goal, however, was to popularize and inspire sympathy for the South’s Unionists and to chronicle the triumph of Unionism in a Confederate state. His account points to the complex and divisive nature of Confederate society and in doing so provides a perspective that has long been absent from discussions of the Civil War

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Lyon College, 1872-2002

The Perseverance and Promise of an Arkansas College

Brooks Blevins

University of Arkansas Press, 2003

This is a history in microcosm of the American small college. It is a story of the power of persistence of the educational ideal, of the communal will to survive, and of the idea of the promise of a better day to come.

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