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When posed with the question of an Arkansas-related blog post topic for Valentine’s Day, the rural community of Romance in White County came to mind. As you may know, the town of Romance gets quite a bit of attention during the Valentine month of February, with the local post office being the hot spot.

Even long after its conclusion, the Civil War has remained a central theme in discussions surrounding the politics of remembrance, with its familiar tropes persisting to this day. While each period has seen its own debate over the legacy of the Civil War, the issue took on unprecedented prominence in 2019 amidst the wave of Black Lives Matter protests.

In the fall of 2022, CALS community liaison Jessica McDaniel and community outreach archivist Danielle Afsordeh met to discuss McDaniel’s vision for a Black Family Expo. The idea for the expo came from McDaniel’s own family history. Her grandmother’s butter churn was proudly displayed in her mother’s home, as a reminder of her family’s history in the South and the legacy of her ancestors.

An early friend of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Bob Cowie, founder of Cowie Wine Cellars, once admonished me for saying something to the effect of Arkansans should only drink Arkansas wines. At the time, early in my tenure at the EOA, I had embraced a somewhat patriotic fervor when it comes to the state,

Happy New Year!

Wow – I have so many things to tell you about! I know that your time and attention are valuable, so I’ll touch only on the high spots.

Our new building-mates have settled in well. Mini-Main is in full swing – you can browse, pick up holds,

Throughout the Central Arkansas Library System, you’ll see art nearly everywhere you look: in galleries, on the walls, and in progress. CALS offers exhibition galleries in the Roberts Library and elsewhere. It also actively collects and exhibits works by artists working and living in Arkansas and has a permanent collection of art that it displays throughout the buildings and grounds of its various libraries.

I believe that it’s important to add a bit of randomness to one’s life. We can be too often confined to our narrow tastes, especially in these days when unseen algorithms dictate much of what we see online or even experience in the real world. Preserving a bit of randomness is a survival technique for the mind and soul.

As Jewish families in Arkansas illuminate their menorahs during the Hanukkah season, the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the CALS Roberts Library would like to shine our own light on the archival collections illustrating the enduring traditions of the state’s Jewish community.

Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, carries deep significance in Jewish tradition.

Many stories are shared at family gatherings around the holidays. The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the CALS Roberts Library would like to help you capture those stories in an oral history interview. Oral history interviews are structured conversations that are created to preserve personal or cultural histories, document unique experiences, illuminate historical events from a personal viewpoint,

Downtown Little Rock has been home to more than a dozen movie theaters over the years, though one would not guess it in this age of suburban cineplexes. It is hard to believe there was a time when four theaters were clustered within a block of each other, with even more spread around the city blocks.