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 information and context as they navigated political news, social justice protests, and an unprecedented global pandemic.
The following entries were the fifteen entries viewed the most from March 2020 to May 2021. Click on the title of each for the link to the full EOA entry.
Memorial plaque listing the names of the twenty-one African-American boys who died in a fire at the 1959 Negro Boys Industrial School. Although a total of twenty-one boys died in the fire, the fourteen whose bodies could not be identified were buried in unmarked graves at Haven of Rest Cemetery; April 21, 2018.
National Guardsman prevents four black students from entering Little Rock Central High School; September 4, 1957. Students shown are (left to right) Carlotta Walls, Gloria Ray, Jane Hill, and Ernest Green.
Chinquapin oak (Castanea ozarkensis) in Riverside Park in Batesville (Independence County); 2011. The tree is 102 feet tall. Chinquapin (Independence County) received its name from the chinquapin trees that once grew in the area. Logging practices and a chestnut blight that struck the Ozarks in the 1950s and 1960s virtually wiped out the tree. Today, very few chinquapin trees are left in Arkansas, and an effort is being made to replenish them.
Mile post no. 94, eight miles east of De Queen (Sevier County), which marked the 1877 boundary between Arkansas and the Choctaw Nation from Fort Smith (Sebastian County) to the Red River.
The Thirteenth Regiment Illinois Infantry at Helena (Phillips County) during the summer of 1862, several months before participating in the Union victory at the Battle of Arkansas Post.
Albert Pike, a political leader and lawyer who served as a Confederate general during the Civil War; circa 1880. He is perhaps best known as a national leader in Freemasonry.
Group of students in front of an unidentified building at the Consolidated White River Academy in Brinkley (Monroe County); 1939.
We don’t yet know what information our readers will seek in the next fifteen months, and beyond, but we’ll be ready for them!
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