Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Forging Community In The Ouachita Foothills Of Southwest Arkansas: Duckett Township, Homesteading, Distilling And Race, Lisa C. Childs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Community was key to successful subsistence agriculture in Arkansas, especially in the Ouachita foothills in southwest Arkansas (including Polk, Howard, Montgomery, Pike, Garland Counties) and Oklahoma (McCurtain, Pittsburgh, LeFlore Counties) until the 1940s. Nearly a quarter of Arkansas’s land remained in the federal government’s name twenty years after statehood, and even more of the land in the western Ouachita foothills. Much remains unknown about how farming communities were formed in this area from the end of the Civil War until approximately World War II. As seen in the Duckett community in northern Howard County, while family connections were important to …

The Marianna Boycott: Healthcare, Political Organization, And Federal Intervention In The Arkansas Delta, Stephen James Franklin Iii

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Marianna Boycott was a thirteen month long civil rights boycott that took place in the Arkansas Delta town of Marianna from 1971 to 1972. The event shut down over twenty-five business, inflicted millions of dollars in economic damage, and forced people living in Lee County to address racial tensions that had been building for decades. This paper examines the Marianna Boycott as an expression of post-Civil Rights Movement conflict over what the various legislative victories of the 1960s meant for Black people in the rural south. This paper posits that while the Civil Rights laws of the era were …

Media Erasure: A 1904 Lynching In St. Charles, Arkansas, Mary Hennigan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As Americans grew increasingly interested in historic racial violence following the Black Lives Matter movement in 2021, select news publications chose to publish apologetic editorials and articles that addressed their failure of inclusive reporting for the last century (Lancaster, 2021; Fannin, 2020). In the theme of acknowledging past mistakes, the Printing Hate project emerged to investigate the power white-owned papers had in influencing lynching incidents in the county (Capital News Service, 2021). The present study examines one Arkansas lynching in 1904 St. Charles. The incident includes the death of 13 Black men. Findings from a content analysis of 70 original …

The Shallow End Of The Deep South: Civil Rights Activism In Arkansas, 1865-1970, Sarah Riva

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On April 7, 1968, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller claimed that “Arkansas today stands at the threshold of leading the nation...for a better America,” The Republican Arkansas Governor spoke on the steps of the state capitol at a memorial for the beloved civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. who had been assassinated three days earlier. Rockefeller’s claim that Arkansas could lead the nation came just two years after the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formally ended its work in the state to improve racial equality. Their efforts had seen widespread acceptance of integrated public facilities, increased voter registration and more meaningful …

Arkansas Aprons: Food Power And Women In Arkansas, 1857 To 1891, Robyn Shahan Spears

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Arkansas foodways in the late nineteenth century were defined by times of plenty and scarcity, need and connection, traditions and innovations. These components created a unique culture in which women through food exchange, were able to improve their standard of living. The years of plenty established in the antebellum era lay in stark contrast to the scarcity during the Civil War. What followed during the Progressive Era are fascinating histories of women employing their agency to empower and improve not only their lives but also future generations. I argue that these women utilized their agency to engage in “food power,” …

Beyond Coattails: Explaining John Paul Hammerschmidt's Victory In 1966, Jesse Ray Sims

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the campaign issues, demographic factors, and voting trends that helped Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt defeat incumbent Democratic congressman James W. Trimble in Arkansas’s third congressional district in 1966. Much of the historiography addressing this election largely neglects the historic significance of Hammerschmidt’s successful campaign and the factors contributing to his victory. Instead, historians primarily write about the election of Republican Winthrop Rockefeller to the governor’s office that year.

This thesis pieces together several theories on how Hammerschmidt defeated Trimble, including the effect of Winthrop Rockefeller’s coattails, the demographic changes taking place in the Ozarks beginning in the …

On The Air, On The Hill: The Story Of Radio At The University Of Arkansas, Blake Ryan Sutton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On the Air, On the Hill: The Story of Radio at the University of Arkansas is a film about the past, present, and future of radio on campus at the U of A. From the original campus station KFMQ in 1924, to the present day student station KXUA and the region’s NPR affiliate KUAF, the film explores not only the rich history of radio at the U of A, but also what the future holds for campus radio in the face of an ever-changing media landscape. The film draws from interviews with Fayetteville historians, as well as the major players …

Place(Ment), Ashley Lynn Byers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout her time at the University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts program, Ashley Byers has been creating work about the folklore, landscape, and people of the Ozarks. Though she continues to create work with the Ozarks in mind, it became a motif used for a broader conversation about the ad hoc, holiness, painting, landscape, the figure, and intimacy.

In many ways, the concepts within her work are born out of the Ozarks.

When can remnants come together to become more than the sum of their parts? Derelict, easily dismissed objects, when set in the right context or viewed through …

Landscape Visibility And Prehistoric Artifact Distribution At Pea Ridge National Military Park, Jake Lee Mitchael

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pea Ridge National Military Park, in the north east corner of Benton County, Arkansas, is the 4,300 acre site of a crucial Civil War Battle. Human occupation of the Ozark Highland landscape, however, extends far into pre-history. A 2005 report to the National Park Service details the findings of a four year cultural resource survey of the park. The sampling strategy employed in the research design (random sample site selection and 2.5% park coverage) provides an excellent dataset to assess prehistoric land use. This dataset is not dependent on artificially defined sites, representing singular activity in a limited geographical space. …

Liminal River: Art, Agency And Cultural Transformation Along The Protohistoric Arkansas River, Leslie Walker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For nearly a century, ceramic vessels looted from Protohistoric Native American Graves in the Central Arkansas River Valley have raised questions about the ethnic identity of the inhabitants of the region and their relationship to their neighbors in time and space. This analysis combines careful documentation of 1198 of these vessels with excavated sherds and other data from the Carden Bottoms site (3YE0025) and adjacent rock art sites in the Arkansas River Valley to provide a context for these vessels and, in so doing, defines the Dardenne Style of artistic production. Comparing motifs, and the manner in which they are …

Vice In The Veil Of Justice: Embedding Race And Gender In Frontier Tourism, Daniel Richard Maher

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes how "frontier" discourses in Fort Smith, Arkansas simultaneously constitute mythological narratives that elide the deleterious effects of imperialism, racism, and sexism, while they operate as marketing schemes in the wager that they will attract cultural heritage tourists. It examines material exhibits and interpretive history programs at locations including the Fort Smith National Historic Site, Fort Smith Museum of History, Miss Laura's Visitor's Center, and the Clayton House; in texts such as the 1898 book by Samuel Harman whose title forever branded Fort Smith as Hell on the Border; in the subsequent branding and marketing derived from the …

Battle Mound: Exploring Space, Place, And History Of A Red River Caddo Community In Southwest Arkansas, Duncan Mckinnon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research is a synthesis of archaeogeophysical and archaeohistorical data collected from the Battle Mound site (3LA1). Using these data, this research seeks to understand how the site is organized in terms of architectural variability and how differential use areas, such as domestic or community space, can be compared to ethnographic and archaeological data concerning Caddo community structure and landscape use. The research is formulated around three research questions related to spatial organization and settlement patterning, intrasite behavioral practices, and Caddo culture history. Results show that an examination at multiple scales of resolution can inform about the spatial organization and …

"An Ample Provision For Our Posterity": Transportation, Ceramic Diversity, And Trade In Historic Arkansas, 1800-1930, Katherine Rose Cleek

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I present a method to study transportation using ceramic diversity and access to transportation infrastructure. Ceramic tableware richness, or the number of types present, is analyzed over time as a proxy for access to local transportation infrastructure at seven sites in Arkansas, dating from approximately 1800 to 1930. Previous efforts to look at trade in historical archaeology including Adams (1976), Riordan and Adams (1985), and Adams, Bowers, and Mills (2001) have not thoroughly assessed transportation as a means of trade. This dissertation looks at the many ways of assessing diversity in archaeology, biology, business, and economics, as …

Feet In The South, Eyes To The West: Fort Smith Enters The Sunbelt, Adam Morrison Carson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the political realignment of Fort Smith, Arkansas and argues that the standard historiographical argument about the process of realignment does not explain what occurred in this city. Much of the historiography of political realignment currently revolves around the belief in a white backlash against the federal government and the national Democratic Party for their support of African American civil rights. Though historians have moved toward a "suburban synthesis" that downplays the backlash thesis, historians still argues that many white southerners moved to the suburbs to avoid integration.

I argue that this process did not occur in the …

The Adair Site: Ouachita River Valley Relations Through Ceramic Analysis, Joanne Demaio

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Adair site (3GA1), located in the Upper Ouachita River Valley in Garland CO, Arkansas is an Upper Ouachita Caddo site. The people at the site are presumed to be at the center of cultural dominance for the area and had interaction with Caddo sites in the region. This thesis explores this by studying the whole vessel collections that were excavated at the Adair site in the 1930s. Comparing the Adair collection to three other Caddo sites provides information about the Social standing of the Adair site, its relations with other sites, and how it fits into the greater fabric …

"It Was Awful, But It Was Politics": Crittenden County And The Demise Of African American Political Participation, Krista Michelle Jones

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the vast scholarship that exists discussing why Democrats sought restrictive suffrage laws, little attention has been given by historians to examine how concern over local government drove disfranchisement measures. This study examines how the authors of disfranchisement laws were influenced by what was happening in Crittenden County where African Americans, because of their numerical majority, wielded enough political power to determine election outcomes. In the years following the Civil War, African Americans established strong communities, educated themselves, secured independent institutions, and most importantly became active in politics. Because of their numerical majority, Crittenden's African Americans were elected to county …

The Price Of Dissent: Freedom Of Speech And Arkansas Criminal Anarchy Arrests, Jamie Leto Kern

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Following World War I and the Bolshevik Revolutions, America's Red Scare began, inciting fanatical patriotism and an alleged threat of anarchy that gripped a nation with fear. Paranoia about communists, Socialists, and anarchists divided the country and resulted in many states, including Arkansas, passing criminal anarchy laws. Since a majority of those accused of anti-American activities were involved in labor disputes, Arkansas makes for an interesting case study; not only did it have a relative lack of labor disputes, it still passed anti-Bolshevik laws. The purpose of this research is to develop an understanding of the ways in which dissenters …