Month: April 2023

The Triumph of Memory: Conversation and Preservation

Watching someone you love succumb to death over a long period can twist how you think about time. It feels like you have so much and none at all—both at once. Every conversation feels both precious and mundane. 

My grandmother’s death was like this. She was sick for several months out of the year for the last few years of her life.


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Spring Art: Current Exhibitions & Book/Gift Sales

Come feast your eyes on three exhibitions currently mounted in the CALS Bobby L. Roberts Library of Arkansas History & Art before the building transforms for a time into use as a regular library. During the renovation of the CALS Main Library, the 1st floor of the CALS Roberts Library (current home of the Galleries &


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History As It Happens: The March 31, 2023, Tornado Outbreak

The March 31, 2023, tornado outbreak had a devastating effect on central Arkansas as well as other parts of the state. Many lives were impacted, and the staff members here at the Central Arkansas Library System feel for those who have experienced such devastation.

It is important at times like this that we make an effort to document such a tragic event,


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The Dark Matter of History

At the recommendation of a friend, I recently read The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by English literary scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, which is one of those big, ambitious books that aims to weave together modern neuroscience with philosophy and literary history and the evolution of what we call “the West.” It is of a species with other books like psychologist Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,


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We allow certain outlets to reprint our copyrighted Butler Banner or CALS Roberts Library blog posts with express permission. To seek permission, please email Glenn Whaley at gwhaley@cals.org.

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