Month: November 2025

As a family tradition, for each of our birthdays, we would request a special homemade meal for dinner. I can vividly remember my eleventh birthday. My mom called me for supper, and I ran to the table, sitting expectantly as my mom set down a piping hot glass dish full of scalloped potatoes.

This was my annual tradition.

As an intern with the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies this summer, I combed through the Small Manuscript and Arkansas Labor collections for any materials that dealt with labor organizing in the state. I found, among other things, strike songs penned by railroad workers, frantic telegrams dictated by union officials, and descriptions of blackened eyes and terminal illness from the children of coal miners.

Andrew Hamilton (Drew) Lander was a businessman and civic leader who spent five years as a member of the Little Rock City Council. His letters, donated to the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies by his family, reveal a different part of his life, when he was serving in the United States Army before and during World War II.

The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the CALS Roberts Library and the CALS DIY Memory Lab recently launched a new initiative designed to help Arkansas faith communities preserve and interpret their historical records. Supported with funds from the Mellon Foundation, the Religious Community History Seminar brings together ten diverse faith communities from across central Arkansas to explore archival preservation,