Tag: Butler Banner Spring 2023

In April 2022, the 1950 federal census was released. It was particularly exciting for many GenXers like me – the children of Baby Boomers. For the first time, I’d be able to find both of my parents in a U.S. Census.

I started by searching for my dad. And there he was, just where I thought he would be –

I’ve been contemplating the nature of history recently, as we often do at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas. I’m sure that this is not a great surprise to readers of this blog.

This contemplation stems, in part, from listening to an audiobook of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara W. Tuchman’s 1978 book,

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.

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 &

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,

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,