Butler Banner

By Kelly Houston Jones, assistant professor of history at Arkansas Tech University

Kelly Houston Jones is currently wrapping up a book project called A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas.

I’d like to kick this list off with the entry on C.

This is goodbye, in a way. On October 1, 2019, I moved to the central administration at CALS to become Director of Strategic Partnerships and Community Engagement for CALS. My excellent colleague Glenn Whaley became the Branch Manager of the Roberts Library, which includes the work branded as the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies.

Local teacher Jeff Davidson had a vision for his summer workshop for teenagers. He wanted to share his fascination with city planning by teaching teens to look closely at the urban world around them, in order to understand how and why their city looks the way it does today.

So Davidson designed a fascinating role-playing curriculum in which each student would assume a role such as Chief Architect,

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, then we would need more than three million words to describe the contents of the CALS Butler Center’s Pulaski County Photograph Collection (BC.PHO.2.A). This collection was started back when the Butler Center was founded in 1997, and it now includes more than 3,100 items.

These photographs represent an important historical record of our area—from buildings that no longer exist to photos that show how
people used to live.

The Woodrow T. Little Collection (BC.MSS.14.83), donated to the CALS Butler Center by Little’s daughter, Janice Smith, is a relatively small collection that contains a wealth of information and images. It tells about Little himself, as well as about his friend, Jesse Garner Reynolds, and about the organization they both worked for, Colonial Baking Company.

The Arkansas River flood of 2019 was being described as “historic” before a single levee was breached or structure flooded. Recognizing the impact the flooding would have on the region, CALS Roberts Library staff decided to try to find a way to preserve community documentation of the flood before the headlines stopped.

Before the water reached its crest in Little Rock,

By David Stricklin, Director of the CALS Roberts Library

Summertime is lively here. The livin’ may be easy, as the song says, but it’s certainly not slow. You can see in this issue of the eBanner our recent work with teachers, new releases of archival materials, our presence in art and music,

We need photographs, documents, videos, maps, and audio clips to help make the CALS EOA the most comprehensive and engaging resource on Arkansas history. If you have photos or other media, please contact CALS EOA Media Editor Mike Keckhaver.

The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas is a changing, evolving resource. This fact will, I hope, become even more evident as we approach the centennial of the Elaine Massacre of 1919. The Elaine Massacre was one of the entries with which we launched the CALS EOA back in 2006, but since then, we have added not only numerous entries that provide a broader context for the violence that happened in Phillips County—such as our entries on race riots and the “Red Scare”

• Visit us in person in the Roberts Library at CALS Library Square (100 Rock St. in downtown Little Rock) to view art in our four exhibition galleries—and shop in our retail gallery for art, jewelry, and other items made by Arkansas artists and artisans.
• Head to the research room in the CALS Roberts Library (second floor) for genealogy and other research,