ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory/River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War","authors":"Mark K. Christ","doi":"10.2307/40028100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40028100","url":null,"abstract":"Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory. By John Cimprich. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 193. Preface, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. By Andrew Ward. (New York: Viking, 2005. Pp. xxiii, 531. Preface, acknowledgments, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) Few subjects will raise the ire of Lost Cause traditionalists as much as the April 12, 1864, battle at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. Nathan Bedford Forrest's Confederate cavalry overwhelmed an outpost on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River that was manned by unionist Tennesseans and black artillerists, many of them former slaves. What followed is probably the Civil War's best-known atrocity, eclipsing similar incidents such as the killing of black troops at Poison Spring, Arkansas, six days later. Fort Pillow remains a bone of contention between those who consider it a massacre and others who deny that interpretation. Were surrendered troops killed on Forrest's orders? Those questions and others are answered in two recent books that explore the events surrounding the fighting at Fort Pillow and its bloody aftermath. John Cimprich's Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory is analytical in its approach, while Andrew Ward's passionate River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War is filled with small details, many of them culled from the statements of participants both immediately after the fight and years later when they were applying for veterans' pensions. While both books discuss the establishment of Fort Pillow, Cimprich's provides more details, including some that will be of particular interest to Arkansawyers. He notes, for instance, that the first garrison at Fort Pillow consisted of Arkansas troops commanded by Patrick Cleburne and that the buildings erected by the first Union garrison were constructed of wood taken from houses the soldiers had torn down in Osceola, Arkansas. Cimprich also devotes a chapter to the naval maneuvers that caused the Confederates to abandon the fort, which Ward does not cover at all. Cimprich, in a crisp, methodical style, scrutinizes the post-battle testimony of survivors of the garrison, the results of a congressional probe of the battle, and postwar southern efforts to portray the fighting at Fort Pillow in a softer light. He offers a detailed historiography that reaches into the 1980s, showing that both the massacre view and the apologist view still have often passionate proponents. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"457"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40028100","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68724900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Brown in Fayetteville: Peaceful Southern School Desegregation in 1954","authors":"A. Brill","doi":"10.2307/40028090","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40028090","url":null,"abstract":"with its decision in brown v. board of education (1954), the United States Supreme Court demanded a complete overhaul of the public education system in the South and brought racial segregation to the forefront of the nation's consciousness and conscience. The American public, white and black, could no longer avoid the issue or simply dismiss school segregation as the inevitable product of culture or tradition. Many Americans, seeing the gains African Americans had already made (e.g., blacks voted in many places and both the military and professional sports were integrated), hoped school desegregation would meet with similar success. But, aided by the Court's passivity in Brown II, segregationists began a campaign to fight desegregation. Ten of the eleven former Confederate states passed legislation allowing or (in the case of Mississippi) forcing districts to maintain segregated schools. Seven states passed laws withholding funds from integrated schools. This resistance was fiercest in the Deep South, but states such as Florida and Arkansas were not immune.1 There is more to the story than massive resistance, however. While images of angry mobs in Little Rock and New Orleans cemented themselves in the American consciousness, desegregation had largely unnoticed pockets of success-even in the months immediately following Brown. Fayetteville, Arkansas, was one such place. Within a week following Brown, Fayetteville announced its intention to desegregate, and, three months later, white and black students were attending the same local high school together. Fayetteville's experience shows that historians must take a more comprehensive approach to southern school desegregation, recognizing the quiet dignity that sometimes marked the process. Fayetteville was no racial Utopia, but the town successfully dealt with the most explosive racial issue of the twentieth century. Its experience is instructive in suggesting important ingredients of successful school integration-namely a lack of excessive preexisting racial tension coupled with firm local leadership. At the time the Court handed down Brown, Arkansas, like the rest of the former Confederacy, had completely segregated elementary and secondary schools. But separate did not mean equal. The state spent $102.25 per capita on white students but just $67.75 on each black student. Yet Gov. Francis Cherry announced that the state would obey the Court, noting that Arkansas had better race relations than many other southern states. The Arkansas Democrat reported that public reaction to the decision \"indicated concern but no alarm.\"2 The newspaper clearly disagreed with the Court's ruling (\"Trying to alter a social pattern by law before custom makes way for change has always seemed unwise to us\"), but also denounced defiance, stating, \"Surely, we can reach a common understanding without friction in order to preserve all the education and social gains that have been made.\"3 The Arkansas Gazette editorialized that","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"337"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40028090","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68725081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand: The Renowned Missouri Bushwhacker","authors":"Kirby Ross, Daniel E. Sutherland","doi":"10.2307/J.CTT1FFJDSF","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/J.CTT1FFJDSF","url":null,"abstract":"Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand: The Renowned Missouri Bushwhacker. Edited by Kirby Ross. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005. Pp. xvii, 276. Series editor's preface by Daniel Sutherland, acknowledgments, introduction, editor's preface [1870], map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.) One of the most controversial aspects of the American Civil War is the guerrilla conflict that raged in Missouri and Arkansas. While historians have recently given this struggle more scholarly attention, research is often hampered by a lack of sources. Fortunately, the most notorious Confederate guerrilla in southeast Missouri, Samuel S. Hildebrand, published an autobiography shortly before his death in 1871, while wartime events were still relatively fresh in his mind. An illiterate man, Hildebrand narrated his story to James W. Evans and A. Wendell Keith, M.D. Hildebrand grew up with these men, and they wrote the text after their extensive interviews with the famous guerrilla. Out of print for decades, Autobiography of Samuel S. Hildebrand: The Renowned Missouri Bushwhacker has been republished by the University of Arkansas Press fully annotated by Kirby Ross. Hildebrand lived in St. Francois County in 1861. Wanting no part in the war, Hildebrand declared that he would have remained neutral had it not been for a local vigilance committee. Headed by unionists, the committee accused Hildebrand of stealing a horse. Though innocent of the crime, he was hunted by Union troops and wounded when they burned his home. The committee also hanged his brother Frank. Sam and his family fled to Arkansas where they found safety in the camp of Capt. Nathan Bolin's guerrilla company. Later, two more of Hildebrand's brothers were killed by Union troops. Another brother served in the Union army. Operating from a base in Arkansas, Hildebrand conducted numerous raids into Missouri, where he preyed on Union civilians and soldiers. He claimed to have a major's commission from Confederate general M. Jeff Thompson, though this is doubtful. Regardless of his legal status, Hildebrand was adept at the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla warfare. He and his comrades often wore captured Federal uniforms and operated successfully throughout southeast Missouri. Hildebrand vowed to kill as many of his enemies as possible and dozens of men suffered his wrath. Nevertheless, he did show mercy on a few captured Union soldiers. In one incident, he released two Federals on their promise to free two of Captain Bolin's men held at Ironton, Missouri. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"315"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68714984","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Farmers' Schools of 1909: The Origins of Arkansas's Four Regional Universities","authors":"James F. Willis","doi":"10.2307/40031077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40031077","url":null,"abstract":"ARKANSAS'S UNIVERSITIES at Jonesboro, Magnolia, Monticello, and Russellville owe their existence to the Farmers' Educational and Cooperative Union. It struggled a century ago to have the legislature establish four agricultural schools in the state. These schools took many decades to flower into universities, an evolution that occurred in several stages and was by no means assured. But without the union's uncompromising demand from 1906 to 1909 for four schools, at least two of these institutions of higher education-Arkansas State University, Arkansas Tech University, Southern Arkansas University, and the University of Arkansas at Monticello-would likely not exist today. Agricultural education reform during the Progressive Era was part of a broader national impulse-the County Life Movement. It aimed generally to reverse the decline of rural America. Several approaches to spreading modern farming practices in a countryside still using traditional methods competed within the movement, including various models for agricultural education. In Arkansas, the views of the Farmers' Union triumphed with respect to the number, type, and management of agricultural schools. The union prevailed even against its allies-Arkansas educators, the General Education Board, and Gov. George W. Donaghey-who wanted fewer schools and different kinds of schools. When the Arkansas legislature in 1909 passed Act 100 to establish a \"State Agricultural School\" in each of four districts, the state joined the front ranks of progressive reform. Such schools at the secondary level had captured the imagination and won the support of many who worried about the widening economic and social gap between urban-industrial America and the agrarian countryside. It was made worse, they believed, by the drain of able, ambitious young people from farm to city. President Theodore Roosevelt declared in 1907: I am firmly convinced that most farmers' boys and girls should be educated through agricultural high schools and through the teaching of practical elementary agriculture in the rural common schools, so that when grown up they shall become farmers and farmers' wives. Education should be toward and not away from the farm. There must be an organized effort to restore or create the highest social condition in the country districts.1 Roosevelt favored legislation that Georgia congressmen introduced to provide federal funding for \"instruction and home economics in secondary agricultural schools.\"2 Roosevelt's assistant secretary of agriculture, WiIlet M. Hays, confidently predicted in 1908 that soon there would be some \"300 to 400 agricultural finishing schools-practically one in each country congressional district.\"3 The Commission on Country Life that Roosevelt established declared in 1909 that \"redirected education\" was of \"paramount importance\" and advocated three approaches: 1) the study of agriculture in \"regular public school work;\" 2) \"specialized agricultural schools;\" and 3) \"extension t","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40031077","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68735715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Life and Times of W. H. Arnold of Arkansas: Reconstructing the Southern Ideal","authors":"Lynn Foster, M. Serebrov","doi":"10.2307/40031084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40031084","url":null,"abstract":"The Life and Times of W. H. Arnold of Arkansas: Reconstructing the Southern Ideal. By Mari Serebrov. (West Conshocken, PA: InfinityPublishing.com, 2005. Pp. xxx, 433. Preface, note about sources, foreword, illustrations, appendices, notes, index of place names, index of people, general index. $20.95, paper.) W. H. Arnold founded both a Texarkana law firm and a dynasty of distinguished attorneys. This book chronicles the story of W. H. Arnold, who lived from 1861 to 1946, and his family in Arkansas. The author contends that Arnold's life epitomized the elite \"Southern ideal,\" comprising a commitment to family, community, and religion, as described by historians such as C. Vann Woodward, Wilbur J. Cash and Bertram Wyatt-Brown (p. xxv). The author convincingly makes her case that Arnold believed in the ideal and made his choices in life accordingly. The chronicle begins in the early 1800s with the Arnold ancestor who moved from Alabama to Arkansas and follows his family's migration to what was then Hempstead County. His daughter Temperance married David Arnold (a distant cousin), who had himself migrated from South Carolina to settle near Lisbon. The couple's children included W. H., who was born at the onset of the Civil War. The fortunes of David, Temperance, and their family are followed through prosperous antebellum times, the disastrous Civil War, and the upheavals of Reconstruction. Roughly the last half of the text traces W. H. Arnold's life. Arnold read for the bar, the most common means of professional training for a lawyer in the nineteenth century. In addition to practicing law, he held various public offices, such as Texarkana city recorder, mayor from 1892 to 1894, and county chair of the Democratic Party. He was an influential member of the Arkansas bar, serving as vice president of the Arkansas Bar Association and a delegate to the 1917 state constitutional convention. He was also one of the founding members of the prestigious American Law Institute, established to reform the common law of the United States. The appendices include a genealogy of the family, selected military and slave records, endnotes, a bibliography, and indexes by place, name, and subject. The book is well researched. The approximately 150 sources include books, articles, censuses, and newspapers. But it has several weaknesses. First, the antebellum chapters of the book contain numerous passages that verge on historical fiction. We are told that \"there were moments, long ones, in which [William Bideston Arnold's] eyes settled musingly on the distant horizon\" (p. 1). William is said to have \"ignored the sounds of bears ravaging the cornfields and the wolves howling in the woods\" while he listened to a preacher at a service in Alabama in 1821 (p. 2). However the endnote to this paragraph tells us that \"[tjhere is no record of William's conversion or of his attendance at this meeting. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"305"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40031084","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68736151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Simon T. Sanders and the Meredith Clan: The Case for Kinship Studies","authors":"M. Kwas","doi":"10.2307/40031078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40031078","url":null,"abstract":"RECENT STUDIES OF KINSHIP have demonstrated that understanding family connections can broaden insights into migratory patterns, political and economic opportunities, and class standing in southern society. Carolyn Earle Billingsley, in Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier, makes a strong case for employing kinship in addition to race, class, and gender as an analytical tool. She notes that kinship alliances were the \"major determinant in social, political, and economic power.\" In the case of women, kinship studies allow scholars to accumulate revealing information about lives and relationships that would otherwise be lost due to their less public nature.1 When biographers focus too narrowly on the achievements of an individual without considering the person's family context, the full truth of the life can be missed. The life of Simon T. Sanders, a prominent citizen in nineteenth-century Washington, Arkansas, offers a case study in the utility of kinship as an analytical tool. In 1980, an essay titled \"Simon T. Sanders: Public Servant\" won the Arkansas Historical Association's Lucille Westbrook Local History Award. Written by Donald Montgomery, then park historian at Old Washington Historic State Park, it subsequently appeared in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. Montgomery based his article largely on an obituary of Sanders published shortly after his death.2 In the quarter-century since its publication, additional sources have come to light, especially with the availability of materials on the internet. These additional sources provide a new perspective on Sanders by illuminating his kinship relations with other Hempstead County residents.3 Simon Sanders was not a man alone in Hempstead County. Through his wife-a member of the Meredith family-and her sisters, he was connected to a large extended family that included a number of the important early settlers of this antebellum community. Simon T. Sanders was born in Wake County, North Carolina, on April 16,1797, to Hardy Sanders, Jr. and Edith Turner. While the Sanders family can be traced back to Virginia in the 160Os, Simon Sanders' great grandparents moved to North Carolina in the 170Os. Simon was the oldest of the known children, followed by William, Cynthia, Elizabeth, and Hardy T.4 Sanders received a common school education and early on showed an aptitude for business and record keeping. He went to work at the age of seventeen, in 1814, in North Carolina secretary of state William Hill's office in Raleigh. It is not known how long Sanders worked for Hill, but the name Simon Sanders appeared as clerk of the North Carolina legislature in 1815 and as secretary of the same body in 1817.5 Apparently, Sanders quickly acquired a reputation for personal integrity, punctuality, and attention to detail. His work was so well respected that he was soon offered a position as personal secretary to Montfort Stokes. Although A. B. Williams, in writing Sander","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"39 1","pages":"250"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40031078","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68735342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Arkansas Atlantis: The Lost Town of Napoleon","authors":"Michael D. Hammond","doi":"10.2307/40031076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40031076","url":null,"abstract":"MARK TWAIN'S SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CHARACTER in Life on the Mississippi had heard a tale of murder, revenge, and buried treasure. A dying man told him of an unscrupulous Union soldier who had stowed ten thousand dollars in gold in Napoleon, Arkansas, during the closing days of the war. Twain sought the treasure and was on his way to Napoleon with directions to the loot: \"Brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of Orleans and Market. Corner toward Court-house. Third stone, fourth row.\" As the riverboat approached Napoleon, Twain told the captain to go ashore, but the captain explained: \"Why, hang it, don't you know? There is n't any Napoleon any more. Has n't been for years and years. The Arkansas River burst through it, tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!\" Any hope that the treasure might remain in the ruins was dashed as the captain described the destruction of the town: \"Just a fifteen minute job, or such a matter. Did n't leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one brick chimney,-all that's left of Napoleon.\" Twain fondly recalled that Napoleon had been a \"good big self-complacent town twenty years ago. Town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights-an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl... and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley.\"1 Napoleon had been washed away by the Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers in the years following the Civil War. Twain's 1883 account of its destruction-\"swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes\"-was more dramatic than the actual process, but the town's ruin demonstrated the Mississippi's power and the futility of efforts to control it. Yet the river had also brought the town into being. The ambitious residents of Napoleon, who had made their town into a well-known stopover for those traveling the Mississippi between the 184Os and 186Os, had paid more attention to the commercial possibilities than to the dangers of the river, which often flooded the town.2 The town of Napoleon existed at the confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas for fewer than fifty years. But many notable events took place at that site even before the town was founded. Some suggest that the Jesuit missionary Marquette may have celebrated Arkansas's first Catholic mass there. It might have been the burial site for Pierre Laclede, who founded St. Louis in 1764 and died on a return trip from New Orleans.3 Napoleon was founded in the 182Os or 183Os by the planter, land speculator, and former French soldier Frederick Notrebe, who named it for \"his old commander,\" though he had been forced to flee Napoleonic France.4 Scholars have disagreed as to the exact year of Napoleon's establishment, some placing it as late as 1840. But Napoleon's first primary school was founded on December 10, 1838. Earlier that year, Bishop Joseph Rosati ","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"201"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40031076","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68735639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wal-Mart : the face of twenty-first-century capitalism","authors":"Steve Striffler, N. Lichtenstein","doi":"10.2307/40031092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40031092","url":null,"abstract":"Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism. Edited by Nelson Lichtenstein. (New York: New Press, 2006. Pp. xv, 349. Acknowledgments, preface, illustrations, tables, maps, notes, contributors, index. $21.95, paper.) The well-written, accessible, and highly informative essays collected by Nelson Lichtenstein in Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism ask two interrelated questions: What is new about this entity called Wal-Mart? And where did the beast come from? These are not easy questions. Could it be that Wal-Mart is simply the latest company to figure out how best to make a profit off America's consumer culture? Is it just an enlarged version of early twentieth-century predecessors such as Woolworth, Sears, and A & P? Is Wal-Mart's impact on workers, communities, and businesses fundamentally different from past corporate giants such as GM and IBM? How did the world's largest corporation get its start in (of all places) Arkansas? The book provides no easy or simplistic answers. In this respect, it is a refreshing and much-needed corrective to the hyperbole surrounding the company. Wal-Mart is often seen either as the source of all evil or as the poster child for a globalized economy. To its credit, this collection, although critical of many of Wal-Mart's practices, policies, and impacts, is not ready to reduce the ills or virtues of modern capitalism to one corporation. Nelson Lichtenstein starts with a fabulous introductory chapter that highlights all that is old and new about Wal-Mart. As he writes, \"Wal-Mart is now the template for world capitalism because it takes the most potent technological and logistic innovations . . . and puts them at the service of an organization whose competitive success depends upon the destruction of all that remains of New Deal social regulation and replaces it, in the U.S. and abroad, with a global system that relentlessly squeezes labor.\" It has made \"the retailer king and the manufacturer his vassal\" (pp. 4-5). The second chapter, by Susan Strasser, historicizes Wal-Mart by situating its rise within the context of the dominant retailing firms that came before it. It is a fascinating story that takes us through the first department stores, mail-order houses, and supermarkets. Strasser concludes that WalMart learned well from its forerunners by serving the neglected rural market once targeted by mail-order houses while putting the department store and supermarket under a single roof. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"321"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40031092","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68735925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Crossing the White Line: SNCC in Three Delta Towns, 1963-1967","authors":"R. Finley","doi":"10.2307/40038293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40038293","url":null,"abstract":"IN NOVEMBER 1965, the red lights of a Gould, Arkansas, police car pulled over a vehicle driven by Dwight Williams, a black activist accompanied by a white female. The constable charged Williams with \"crossing the white line.\" Although describing a driving infraction, the phrase could also have referred to the repeated violations of racial etiquette that occurred in Arkansas in the 1960s. In that decade, black and white Arkansans witnessed the dismantling of Jim Crow-a system of laws, customs, mores, and values that had encrusted the South since the Civil War. \"The Negro population has been waiting for years for this movement and it has finally arrived. It's a rather incredible experience,\" noted one black in the Arkansas delta. Another African American insisted that it was not so much that dreams had suddenly come alive, but rather that life finally approximated \"the ways things should have been.\"^sup 1^ Some Arkansas whites, on the other hand, dreaded change. Congressman E. C. (Took) Gathings of West Memphis told the House Rules Committee in 1964 that the \"lot of the southern Negro isn't as bad as it is sometimes painted. He understands the members of the white race and they understand him.\" \"We know our niggers a little better than you,\" a West Helena realtor assured an \"outside agitator.\" But John Bradford, one such \"agitator\" who came to Helena, did not see the same delta as Gathings and the realtor. \"The housing is so bad that when you're inside, you're still outside. We were renting a room and every time it rained, we got wet. There were no bathroom facilities. They [delta blacks] aren't living. They're just existing. They have nothing to be happy about.\" A black activist in Gould agreed: \"We were being oppressed, depressed, held back, kept down.... When you got out of school, you had to migrate to the North or just be stuck in a rut here.\" A white former resident of Helena returned for a visit in 1963 and sensed the conflict brewing: \"The Negro is bearing more on the mind of southerners today than at any time in history. The white southerner is worried. He knows the Negro is seeking his rights but does not know where the next move will be.\"^sup 2^ The black and white activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were among those plotting these moves. SNCC was founded at an April 1960 conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, after students used sit-ins to integrate Woolworth lunch counters in nearby Greensboro and Nashville, Tennessee. Although no Arkansan attended the April meetings, SNCC leaders immediately recruited students from Philander Smith College, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church institution founded in 1877 in Little Rock. These new recruits joined veteran Little Rock civil rights activists and began sitins at downtown Woolworths in March 1960. Intra-group rivalries, poor planning, and fear of police reprisals resulted in failure; seating at Woolworth remained segregated.^sup 3^ For ","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40038293","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68755093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nine-teenth-Century America","authors":"D. Hofsommer, R. G. Angevine","doi":"10.2307/40038300","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40038300","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"65 1","pages":"177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40038300","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68755547","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}