Category: CALS Roberts Library Blog

Artist Kevin Kresse, who has three children and lives with his wife in Little Rock, explained what this piece of art means to him:

“I’ve always tried to use people close to me as models for my work when I can. I used my next-door neighbor Darryl Jordan and his son James for this piece.

Looking for the perfect gift for the person who has everything? Well, the Galleries at Library Square is the place for you! Here are our STAFF PICKS for the 2019 Holiday Season!

We will be open on Saturday from 9 am to 6 pm. Stop by and shop local with us!

By Alysanne Crymes

The CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in the Bobby L. Roberts Library of Arkansas History & Art has a wealth of genealogical materials and information for those who are interested in searching their family tree. I’d like to give a little history of how these offerings have grown and changed over the years.

This feature of our Butler Banner invites readers to click their way into our many and varied digital resources. The CALS Butler Center’s Research Services Division recently digitized reel-to-reel recordings of dictated letters home from a Little Rock U.S. Marine who was serving in Vietnam.

Listen to the recordings.

James Edward Mitchell was born in Little Rock on January 19,

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,