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Preserve Arkansas was founded in 1980 as the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas to facilitate communication and cooperation among the various community and regional historic preservation organizations in Arkansas. Since its founding, it has held annual meetings/conferences, as well as workshops, fundraisers, and other activities. At each annual conference, the Alliance has presented awards in several categories for recent achievements of historic preservation in Arkansas.

The last time I wrote was on January 5. I was full of hope that day that turning over the calendar page would put the negatives of 2020 behind us and all would be positive and rosy in 2021.

The events in Washington DC the next day told us all that we weren’t on a direct path to that.

In this intriguing and timely exhibition, on view through April 7 in the CALS Roberts Library, Galleries at Library Square, artist Terry Brewer takes the hateful rallying cry for racial purity “Blood and Soil!” used in the past by Nazis and in the present by white supremacists and morphs it into the idea of working with both substances as media for thought-provoking art.

In September 1957, the federal government mandated and enforced the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. In August 1958, Governor Orval Faubus directed the Arkansas General Assembly to legislate that any school facing desegregation be closed. Because of court orders, the legislation closed all four public high schools in Little Rock: Central High,

Over 20 years ago, as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, I took Arkansas History with C. Fred Williams. One of the course requirements was to trace your family history back three generations and write a narrative about those family members. The brilliance of this assignment was it required students to develop research skills while exploring their own personal history.

You may have noticed that Arkansas was in the national news a few weeks ago. This is rarely a good thing.

In this particular case, the national ire and incredulity directed toward the Natural State related to two bills, House Bill 1218 and House Bill 1231, which would have prohibited schools from offering any curriculum that might broadly promote the idea of social justice and prohibited schools from using any curriculum linked to the New York Times’s 1619 Project,

Arkansas has an extensive history of transformative contributions by African American psychologists in the fields of psychology, education, and social justice. On February 28, 2020, the Arkansas Association of Black Psychology Professionals (AABPP) in collaboration with the Diversity Committee of the Arkansas Psychological Association, Philander Smith College’s Social Justice Institute, and the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site hosted “Historical Contributions of African American Psychologists from Arkansas” on the campus of Philander Smith College in Little Rock.

The CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies’ manuscripts division has recently digitized materials from the Fred T. Jones Sr. Collection, which was donated to the Butler Center by Jones’s daughter Marie Jones Griffin in 1997. Fred T. Jones was a physician and pioneer in providing insurance and medical care to African Americans in Arkansas and Louisiana,

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner (it’s on Sunday!), we’re excited to have some one-of-a-kind pieces of Arkansas art that are perfect for that special someone.

Roger Buchanan makes amazing “treasure boxes” that can be used by anyone to store their jewelry and treasured items, and Richard Prewitt just brought in some sparkling jewels in the form of transformed vintage watches.

The CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies is pleased to announce the creation of a digital exhibit documenting the history of Little Rock’s West Ninth Street, once a center of commerce and culture for the city’s African Americans. The project uses a mapping program to create an interactive narrative, useful for providing context and illustrating spatial relationships.