Morris S. Arnold

Distilled from Arkansas: A Narrative History, the definitive work on the subject since its original publication in 2002, Arkansas: A Concise History is a succinct one-volume history of the state from the prehistory period to the near-present. Featuring four historians who have published extensively on a range of topics, the volume introduces readers to the major issues that have confronted the state and traces the evolution of those issues across time. The book begins by situating the state geographically and geologically and then moves on to chapters covering prehistory and precolonial periods. These chapters, written by George Sabo III, director of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey, ground the reader in the important background of native peoples and their lifeways. Judge Morris S. Arnold’s chapter on the colonial period portrays the colonial French and Spanish era and the interaction of those Europeans with Native Americans, particularly the Quapaw Indians. Civil War historian Tom DeBlack covers the territorial era, early statehood, antebellum, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Jeannie Whayne covers the period following Reconstruction including the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, World War I, the Elaine Race Massacre, the Great Depression, WorldWar II and its aftermath, the Civil Rights movement, bringing the book into the early twenty-first century. Linking these moments together and placing an emphasis on how economic decisions have informed Arkansas’s history, Arkansas: A Concise History puts perspective on the political and economic realities the state continues to face today.

Arkansas Post, the first European settlement in what would become Jefferson’s Louisiana, had an important mission as the only settlement between Natchez and the Illinois Country, a stretch of more than eight hundred miles along the Mississippi River. The Post was a stopping point for shelter and supplies for those travelling by boat or land, and it was of strategic importance as well, as it nurtured and sustained a crucial alliance with the Quapaw Indians, the only tribe that occupied the region. The Arkansas Post of Louisiana covers the most essential aspects of the Post’s history, including the nature of the European population, their social life, the economy, the architecture, and the political and military events that reflected and shaped the Post’s mission. Beautifully illustrated with maps, portraits, lithographs, photographs, documents, and superb examples of Quapaw hide paintings, The Arkansas Post of Louisiana is a perfect introduction to this fascinating place at the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers, a place that served as a multicultural gathering spot, and became a seminal part of the history of Arkansas and the nation.

Arkansas: A Narrative History is a comprehensive history of the state that has been invaluable to students and the general public since its original publication. Four distinguished scholars cover prehistoric Arkansas, the colonial period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and incorporate the newest historiography to bring the book up to date for 2012. A new chapter on Arkansas geography, new material on the civil rights movement and the struggle over integration, and an examination of the state's transition from a colonial economic model to participation in the global political economy are included. Maps are also dramatically enhanced, and supplemental teaching materials are available.

The Rumble of a Distant Drum opens in 1673 when Marquette and Jolliet sailed down the Mississippi River and found the Quapaw already in residence in the Arkansas Post, where the Arkansas River flowed into the Mississippi. Here, they established the first European settlement in this part of the country, thirty years before New Orleans and eighty years before St. Louis. Morris S. Arnold draws on his many years of archival research and writing on colonial Arkansas to produce this elegant account of the cultural intersections of the French and Spanish with the native American peoples. He demonstrates that the Quapaws and Frenchmen created a highly symbiotic society in which the two disparate peoples became connected in complex and subtle ways - through intermarriage, trade, religious practice, and political/military alliances.

Before Arkansas was acquired by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, it was claimed first by France, then later by Spain. Both of these cultures profoundly influenced the development of the region and its inhabitants, as evidenced in the many cultural artifacts that constitute the social, economic, and political history of colonial Arkansas. Based on exhaustive research in French, Spanish, and American archives, Colonial Arkansas 1686–1804 is an engaging and eminently readable story of the state’s colonial period. Examining a wide range of subjects—including architecture, education, agriculture, amusements, and diversions of the period, and the Europeans’ social structures—Judge Morris S. Arnold explores and describes the relations between settlers and the indigenous Indian tribes, the early military and its activities, and the legal traditions observed by both the Spanish and French governments. This lively and illuminating study is sure to remain the definitive history of the state’s colonial period and will be equally embraced by scholars, historians, and curious Arkansans eager to develop a fuller understanding of their rich and varied heritage. 1992 Certificate of Commendation from American Association for State and Local History

Partly because its colonial settlements were tiny, remote, and inconsequential, the early history of Arkansas has been almost entirely neglected. Even Arkansas Post, the principal eighteenth-century settlement, served mainly as a temporary place of residence for trappers and voyageurs. It was also an entrepot for travelers on the Mississippi—a place to be while on the way elsewhere. Only a very few inhabitants, true agricultural settlers, ever established themselves a or around the Post. For most of the eighteenth century, Arkansas’s non-Indian population was less than one hundred, and never much exceeded five or six hundred. Its European residents of that era, mostly French, have left virtually no physical trace: the oldest buildings and the oldest marked graves in the state date from the 1820s. Drawing on original French and Spanish archival sources, Morris Arnold chronicles for the first time the legal institutions of colonial Arkansas, the attitude of its population towards European legal ideas as were current in Arkansas when Louisiana was transferred to the United States in 1803. Because he views the clash of legal traditions in the upper reaches of the Jefferson’s Louisiana as part of a more general cultural conflict, Arnold closely examines the social and economic characteristics of Arkansas’s early residents in order to explain why, following the American takeover, the common law was introduced into Arkansas with such relative ease.