What do Scott Joplin, John Grisham, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Maya Angelou, Brooks Robinson, Helen Gurley Brown, Johnny Cash, Alan Ladd, and Sonny Boy Williamson have in common? They’re all Arkansans. What do hillbillies, rednecks, slow trains, bare feet, moonshine, and double-wides have in common? For many in America these represent Arkansas more than any Arkansas success stories do. In 1931 H. L. Mencken described AR (not AK, folks) as the “apex of moronia.” While, in 1942 a Time magazine article said Arkansas had “developed a mass inferiority complex unique in American history.” Arkansas/Arkansaw is the first book to explain how Arkansas’s image began and how the popular culture stereotypes have been perpetuated and altered through succeeding generations. Brooks Blevins argues that the image has not always been a bad one. He discusses travel accounts, literature, radio programs, movies, and television shows that give a very positive image of the Natural State. From territorial accounts of the Creole inhabitants of the Mississippi River Valley to national derision of the state’s triple-wide governor’s mansion to Li’l Abner, the Beverly Hillbillies, and Slingblade, Blevins leads readers on an entertaining and insightful tour through more than two centuries of the idea of Arkansas. One discovers along the way how one state becomes simultaneously a punch line and a source of admiration for progressives and social critics alike. Winner, 2011 Ragsdale Award

Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937) was an American author and biographer best known for his work with Mark Twain. He was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Committee and wrote in several genres, including fiction, humour, and verse. Paine was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts and moved to Bentonsport, Iowa at the age of 1. He later moved to St. Louis, where he trained as a photographer, and became a dealer in photographic supplies in Fort Scott, Kansas. He wrote several children's books, the first of which was published in 1898. He went on to write about his travelling adventures, including The Tent Dwellers, written about a trout fishing trip to Nova Scotia. Other works by him: The Boy's Life of Mark Twain (1916), Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 volumes (1917), Mark Twain's Letters, 2 volumes (1917), A Short Life of Mark Twain (1920), Mark Twain's Speeches (1923) and Life and Lillian Gish (1932).

Winner, 2020 J.G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association “I reckon stranger you have not been used much to traveling in the woods,” a hunter remarked to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as he trekked through the Ozark backcountry in late 1818. The ensuing exchange is one of many compelling encounters between Arkansas travelers and settlers depicted in Arkansas Travelers: Geographies of Exploration and Perception, 1804–1834. This book is the first to integrate the stories of four travelers who explored Arkansas during the transformative period between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and statehood in 1836: William Dunbar, Thomas Nuttall, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and George William Featherstonhaugh. In addition to gathering their tales of treacherous rivers, drunken scoundrels, and repulsive food, historian and geographer Andrew J. Milson explores the impact such travel narratives have had on geographical understandings of Arkansas places. Using the language in each traveler’s narrative, Milson suggests, and the book includes, new maps that trace these perceptions, illustrating not just the lands traversed, but the way travelers experienced and perceived place. By taking a geographical approach to the history of these spaces, Arkansas Travelers offers a deeper understanding—a deeper map—of Arkansas.

Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies. Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.

In 1929, in a remote county of the Arkansas Ozarks, the gruesome murder of harmonica-playing drifter Connie Franklin and the brutal rape of his teenaged fiancée captured the attention of a nation on the cusp of the Great Depression. National press from coast to coast ran stories of the sensational exploits of night-riding moonshiners, powerful "Barons of the Hills," and a world of feudal oppression in the isolation of the rugged Ozarks. The ensuing arrest of five local men for both crimes and the confusion and superstition surrounding the trial and conviction gave Stone County a dubious and short-lived notoriety. Closely examining how the story and its regional setting were interpreted by the media, Brooks Blevins recounts the gripping events of the murder investigation and trial, where a man claiming to be the murder victim--the "Ghost" of the Ozarks--appeared to testify. Local conditions in Stone County, which had no electricity and only one long-distance telephone line, frustrated the dozen or more reporters who found their way to the rural Ozarks, and the developments following the arrests often prompted reporters' caricatures of the region: accusations of imposture and insanity, revelations of hidden pasts and assumed names, and threats of widespread violence. Locating the past squarely within the major currents of American history, Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South paints a convincing backdrop to a story that, more than 80 years later, remains riddled with mystery.

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Originally released in 1932, Wayman Hogue's Back Yonder is a rare and entertaining memoir of life in rural Arkansas during the decades follow- ing the Civil War. Using family legends, personal memories, and events from Arkansas history, Hogue, like his contemporary Laura Ingalls Wilder, creatively weaves a narrative of a family making its way in rug- ged, impoverished, and sometimes violent places. From one-room schoolhouses to moonshiners, the details in Hogue's story capture the essence of a particular time and place, even as the characters reflect a universal quality that endears them to the mod- ern reader. This reissue of Back Yonder, the first in the Chronicles of the Ozarks series, features an introduction by historian Brooks Blevins that explores the life of Charles Wayman Hogue, analyzes the people and events that inspired the book, and places the volume in the context of America's discovery of the Ozarks in the years between the World Wars.