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The EOA at 15: EOA Staff Picks for 15 Must-See Photos
For 15 years since its launch in May 2006, the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas has amassed more than 11,000 pieces of media to accompany its more than 6,000 entries: photos, documents, maps, audio clips,...
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The EOA at 15: CALS Staffers Pick Their Favorite EOA Entries
To help celebrate 15 years of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas—the only state encyclopedia produced and supported by a public library—we asked 15 staff members from around the Central Arkansas Library...
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The EOA at 15: The 15 Most Popular Entries of the Past 15 Months
The past fifteen months have been a tumultuous time, and Arkansans—as they’ve been doing for fifteen years now, since our launch in May 2006—have looked to the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas to provide...
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Star Trek Day with the EOA
George Takei, who played Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the Star Trek television series and subsequent movies; circa 1991. Happy Star Trek Day! Arkansas has lots of connections with Star Trek, whose...
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History and the Abyss: What We Know about What Happened
Folklorist Vance Randolph, who traveled throughout the state in the 1940s and 1950s to collect and record traditional music. Most people seem to believe that history is, broadly speaking, “the study of...
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Striving for the Elusive Complete Set
A complete set is a wonderful thing. When I was much younger and collected comic books, I always had to fill out whatever series I was collecting. The first comic book I ever bought was G.I. Joe no....
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A Strange and Historic Time: Chronicling the COVID-19 Pandemic in Arkansas
We are near the end of another year affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, and we’re taking stock of the work we’ve done at both the CALS Roberts Library and the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas to...
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History as Alchemy
Newspaper columnists and the like usually run a “the people we lost” piece this time of year, a collection of all the notable lives that were sadly extinguished at some point during the previous twelve...
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The Winter of Our Content
Content. Those seven letters essentially make up one word with two somewhat different but related meanings (and different pronunciations). The first sense is the one evoked by a “table of contents,”...
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Famous Couples of Arkansas
On this Valentine’s Day, we’re thinking about love in the Natural State, turning our focus to some Arkansas couples who have made an impact on the state, nation, and world. Click on the names in the...
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A Vision: An Encyclopedia by All, for All
Do you have the right to write for the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas? I’ve had occasion recently to visit with some of the people who were on the ground floor of creating the Encyclopedia of Arkansas...
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“Through a Glass Darkly”: Adapting to Evolving Language
Language changes. This fact is rather frustrating for us editors. And the irony is that, while online resources can most capably respond to changes in usage, they can also appear the most behind the...
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The EOA at 16: We’re Taking the Wheel!
“I am sixteen, going on seventeen…” sings the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas in its best Rodgers and Hammerstein Sound of Music teenager voice. Watch out on the roads—we’re old enough to DRIVE! Born (as...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas’s Ever-Growing Media Collection: New Additions
Some of the most recent additions have come from Cabot’s Museum of American History and from the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. The Museum of American History, formerly known as The...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas: Creating a Fertile Field
If you have watched many movies from the famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, you have probably seen, in the bleak Scandinavian landscape he often depicts, ancient stone walls lining rural farmsteads...
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The Invisible Work Behind the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Work can be like the proverbial iceberg—you don’t see most of its mass because it is hidden under an expanse of water. That is to say that any job, even one with a predominantly public side, entails a...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas Launches Redesigned Website
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA), a project of the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS), has begun a new phase of its life with a website redesign that improves the user experience for students,...
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Arkansas History’s Ecosystem—and Your Place in It
The history community is like an ecosystem, with its various parts drawing energy and nutrition from other areas and, in turn, contributing energy and nutrition to other parts in ways that might not be...
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The Encyclopedia of Arkansas as a Tool of Social Coordination
I’ve been pondering matters of terminology quite a bit here lately—namely, the limits of our words to capture anything like reality. This stems, in large part, from my own research into racial...
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Taking a New Stand on the EOA’s County Histories
I started reading Stephen King in junior high school, but I didn’t get around to his 1978 book The Stand before he released an expanded version, with more than 400 additional pages, in 1990. I imagine...
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Papers at Our Fingertips at the EOA and Beyond
Back in November I went back to the Arkansas State Archives for my first visit in more than a year, needing to access some railroad commission records, as well as a newspaper from 1933. I had spent a...
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Flipping the Page on the Modern Era
It’s hard to tell when you’ve turned the corner from one historical epoch to another. In fact, the argument could be made that very rarely is the break from one period to another so clean. Sitting in...
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Dropping History Is Impossible
I recently had a student of mine, from when I was doing some adjunct teaching at the University of Arkansas Clinton School for Public Service, contact me regarding the possibility of her going back to...
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The Foundation of Knowledge
Probably in late elementary school or early junior high, I began reading a lot of classic science fiction, especially the novels of Isaac Asimov. I was particularly entranced with his Foundation...
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The Dark Matter of History
At the recommendation of a friend, I recently read The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by English literary scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist,...
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Illuminating History Outside the Headlines
I’ve been contemplating the nature of history recently, as we often do here at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas. I’m sure that this is not a great surprise to readers of this blog. This contemplation...
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Get to Work!: Slouching toward the Absolute
“I might eventually write something, but right now I’m just enjoying the research too much.” I hear these words often, and they set me on edge each time. Usually, someone has just told me about some...
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Points of Pride: Identity and Language
June is Pride Month, the perfect time to talk about gender and orientation. I’m excited we live in a time and place where people are increasingly allowed to explore the gender identity and orientation...
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Homemade Soap versus the Chatbot
Now that everyone else has written think pieces about AI, it’s time that the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas weighed in. But first, let’s talk about soap. I like to buy handmade soap when there are...
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Tree of Talking: What Makes an Arkansan?
In his 1998 book The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness down to Size, Danish science writer Tor Nørretranders introduces the concept of a “tree of talking.” The idea is that if I want to communicate...
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The Whole Story: What an Encyclopedia Can and Cannot Capture
Recently, I went to the memorial service for Grif Stockley, a well-known Arkansas lawyer, writer, and historian who died in January in Virginia, where he had been living to be close to his daughter....
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The Root Systems of History
My long-suffering colleague Ali Welky, who manages the Roberts Library blog and this Encyclopedia of Arkansas blog, occasionally complains that my own contributions here too often take the form of...
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The EOA’s Project Zelda
I wanted to call it Project Hogthrob after Link Hogthrob of The Muppet Show, but I was outvoted. Instead, it was named Project Zelda. This has been something with which we have been preoccupied of...
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Embracing the Random
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...
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Tasting Other Wines
Cowie Wine Cellars in Paris (Logan County); 2007. 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...
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Book Flood: Exploring Free Will and Memory
Some years back, my wife read about the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod, which translates literally as “Christmas book flood” and entails giving and receiving new books on Christmas Eve. She liked...
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Oscars for Arkansas?
The recent Academy Awards celebration put me in mind of the many movies filmed in—or made about—Arkansas, if only because while the state has sent forth a number of talented people who have been...
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Behind the Scenes at the EOA: April Fools’ Day Entries
By the time you read this, we here at 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...
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Everyone, take your seats!: An EOA Slideshow
Since the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas 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...
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Department of Corrections: The EOA at 18
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...
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Booking It: Bibliographic Adventures with the EOA
Late last year, I wrote about how I ended up reading a selection of romance novels and other books of the sort I would not normally read, spurred on by a freelance writing gig. I imagined that these...
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A Summer’s Day
The other day, I was in my backyard, where I’m carving out a new garden plot, digging some trenches for the metal edging I was laying down. I started at 8:00 in the morning, but by only an hour in, I...
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Flyover Literature
Sean Clancy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recently published a profile of Little Rock romance novelist Margaret Etheridge (who writes under the name Maggie Wells), author of the Arkansas Special...
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Arkansas’s Past and Future: An Internship Experience at the CALS EOA
As a heritage studies PhD student at Arkansas State University, I spend a lot of my free and scheduled time with my head buried in books and peer-reviewed articles that reveal intimate details about...
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What’s in a Name?
“I, José da Silvestra, who am now dying of hunger in the little cave where no snow is on the north side of the nipple of the southernmost of the two mountains I have named Sheba’s Breasts, write this...
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