Tag: Butler Banner Spring 2024

So the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas is now eighteen years old, having celebrated its birthday last week. I am told by my associate editor that I should write a celebratory piece, but all I can remember from my eighteenth birthday is registering for Selective Service at the post office and then going to the Craighead County Courthouse to register to vote.

To make our rich book and periodicals collection more accessible to researchers, the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Roberts Library has been working to digitize books from our collections not bound by copyright to make them accessible via the web. 

Items are scanned by our staff and then uploaded to our digital collections on the Arkansas Studies Research Portal at www.arstudies.com where users can use keyword searches to find information that may be relevant to their research.

Since the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA) turns 18 years old on May 2 this year (in just over a week!), it made sense to me that there ought to be some kind of high school-style presentation. So, what’s this presentation about? I’m so glad you asked! I figured it’d be fun and interesting to take a look at our stats regarding entry content.

In 2019, Jim Conner of Little Rock donated a treasure trove of family material to the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. The family has been part of Little Rock’s history for over 150 years.

What came to be called the Keith-Conner family collection contains documents, photographs, and memorabilia relating to the Keith family of Little Rock and the Conner family of Little Rock and Augusta,

The expansion of historical knowledge starts locally, grows to state significance, and may explode onto the national scene.

A group was organized with a plan to document six communities in Pulaski County that follow Arkansas Highway 365 South. The Arkansas African American Historical and Genealogical Society, Preservation of African American Cemeteries,

By the time you read this, the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA) will have posted our annual April Fools’ Day entry, and while everyone seems to appreciate them, you should know that I’m not just making stuff up. Or that I’m not making everything up in these entries.

Early in life, I learned that in the United States of America, there was once a “one-drop rule” determining whether a person was black (or “colored” or “Negro” in the terminology of a certain time frame). The rule specified that one ancestor with “one drop” of black blood determined you to be black.

This spring offers a bountiful bouquet of opportunities to view and experience art at the Central Arkansas Library System through exhibitions, events, and classes.

Exhibitions

The exhibition Courtesy of the Collectors: Portraits of African Americans in Photographs, Paintings, and Drawings opened in the Underground Gallery in the CALS Roberts Library in January and is in its last days.