Clyde E. Palmer: Arkansas Newspaper Publisher began as a thesis by Lawrence J. Bracken, a student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Bracken's extensive research over several years traces the career and impact of Palmer, a force in American journalism for nearly 50 years until his death in 1957. Palmer, an enterprising Arkansas newspaper publisher, engineered a conglomerate of media properties that was uncommon in his era. He was a successful businessperson and became a pioneer of technological developments in newspaper publishing. He established a lasting influence through the many future editors and publishers that worked for him before their careers took them to leadership positions at newspapers across the nation. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is as the patriarch of the four successive family generations of publishers to lead with a powerful commitment to journalism in the public interest supported by sustainable profits from the business of journalism. Palmer's daughter Betty obtained a degree in journalism at the University of Missouri, where she met Walter Hussman, who devoted his career to the company in both newspaper publishing and moving it into television broadcasting and cable television. The company WEHCO Media Inc. carries the mantle of Palmer's legacy today under the leadership of Palmer's grandson, Walter Hussman Jr. Hussman's daughter, Eliza Hussman Gaines, leads the company's flagship newspaper as managing editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In an era when newspapers are challenged by digital economics, understanding the roots of the business and the importance of journalism to civic society is perhaps more important than ever. Palmer's story is one of America's early newspaper success stories, which has carried forward for over a century.

Making a Modern U.S. West surveys the history of the U.S. West from 1898 to 1940, centering what is often relegated to the margins in histories of the region—the flows of people, capital, and ideas across borders.

South and West, delta and mountains, black and white, rich and poor, Arkansas is a complex state whose history has not been widely understood. In this graceful and good-humored account, author Harry S. Ashmore takes us on an instructive journey over the state's fascinating terrain and offers important new insights into Arkansas's historical character. Arkansas lies west of the Mississippi River and has shared much with that vast western region. Yet it also joined the Confederate States of America and has prided itself on its southern heritage. In the early nineteenth century, Arkansas was little removed from its wilderness beginnings, but the Indians who first made its hills and forests their home soon learned that the white man's frontier meant their demise. Later in the antebellum era, the young state searched for a sense of identity, covering with a patina of gentility the energy and violence that was characteristic of frontier America. The Civil War and Reconstruction brought both suffering and freedom and for the future left a mixed legacy. In the last hundred years, Arkansans struggled with old problems in a new context--race, cotton, sharecropping, and a colonial economy--and they discovered anew the need for hard work and good faith. On rich delta plantations and spare upland farms, in small towns and in cities like Little Rock and Fort Smith, the plain people of this state applied themselves to the pursuit of prosperity and hoped for a richer near future for their children.