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Pharoah Sanders was a Grammy Award winner American jazz saxophonist. He was tagged as the “best tenor player in the world” by the great Ornette Coleman. He was famous for his harmonic and multiphonic techniques on the saxophone. He was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1940. Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane were his earliest musical influences. Sanders first performance was on Coltrane's Ascension, then on their dual-tenor collaboration Meditations recorded in November 1965.

There is broad consensus that churches should be places of beauty, but for different reasons. The aesthetic design of a church may be viewed as a way of signaling holiness--the presence of the holy (i.e., the divine) within the sacred (i.e., a cultural complex drawing upon sacred tradition and fostering a sacred community). The emphasis in the classic sacramental tradition on an interplay of transcendence and immanence—with creation of height, light, and volume that call attention to themselves and serve as sacred symbols—is illustrated by early descriptions (ekphraseis) of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (Istanbul) An alternative conception of church aesthetics is found at Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis, where architectural forms are simple and subtle reminders of grace. A church by Julia Morgan serves as an example of architectural articulation. And the Thorncrown Chapel at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, illustrates the integration of church design with natural setting.

This chapter concludes this book's research conducted in Delight and Earle, Arkansas. In 2010, the school in Delight was consolidated with Murfreesboro High, while only two of the schools in Earle remain open. Dunbar Middle School closed and its students split between the other schools. Looking at the future for schools in Delight and Earle, this chapter emphasizes the need for the development of a more distinct and connected approach to education policy. We need reforms that balance individual and collective needs, support for local and national goals, and foster racial and geographic justice.

This chapter asserts that scholars who focus on the scenes of violent unrest precipitated by the political antics of Governor Orval Faubus misrepresent the real character of the crisis. It focuses less on the public scenes of massive resistance than on the policy of minimum compliance pursued by Arkansas’s superintendent of schools, Virgil T. Blossom. It discusses that although Blossom claimed to steer a politically moderate course between what he called the extremists on both sides of the integration issue, his strategy was simply a more insidious means of undermining implementation of the Supreme Court decision.

The cultural side of the evolution–creation debate, playing out in religion and mass media, is illustrated by the lives of Eugenie Scott and Phillip Johnson. Scott is the director of the anticreationist National Center for Science Education. Johnson is a Berkeley law professor, an anti‐Darwinist, and an intelligent design leader. Against the backdrop of an Arkansas court case and California debates, here is a history of the Center's work, rooted in the 1970s, and Johnson's prominence since the 1990s.

The John Scopes “monkey trial” over evolution in 1925 set a pattern for news coverage of future disputes in courts, churches, school boards, and legislatures. This chapter samples media treatment of science–religion disputes – from Galileo to Arkansas and Kansas – and applies a news “framing” theory. It details court cases, political battles, news bias, and academic events on science–religion topics.

This chapter traces the literary antecedents of the hillbilly representation in America that grew out of the separate but overlapping “image streams” of the New England rustic yokel “Brother Jonathan”, the poor white of the Southern backcountry, and the mythic frontiersman of Appalachia and Arkansas. It examines the cultural construction of the Southern mountain folk from William Byrd's Secret History of the Dividing Line to the song-story “the Arkansas Traveller” to the turn-of-the-century “local colorists”. Although some authors and social commentators used the conception of the mythic mountaineer to denigrate, and others to celebrate the folkways and primitive conditions of the hill people, in all cases this idea ignored the reality of late 19th-century economic and social upheaval in the region, and instead defined the hill folk as a people caught forever in an unceasing past.

Chapter Three discusses the more than 300,000 braceros —Mexican men on temporary labor contracts—who worked the Arkansas Delta’s cotton fields between 1948 and 1964. In some years, these braceros comprised more than a third of all the Arkansas Delta’s cotton laborers. Braceros seldom received the wages and working conditions guaranteed in their contracts, and initially were excluded from whites-only establishments. But during the decade following their arrival, they successfully resisted Jim Crow-style exclusion through appeals to the Mexican government. The victory was ambiguous, and gave way to a new, more fluid separation in which Mexicans insisted on access to white public space but in practice preferred to socialize with African Americans. And, the first-class citizenship that Mexicans demanded with an end to their formal segregation never extended into the economic realm, where they fought for, but failed to win, broad guarantees of economic security.

This chapter traces the readmission of evolution into the classroom during the 1960s, leading up to the Epperrson case, which struck down Arkansas anti-evolution law, and parallel legal actions in Tennessee and Mississippi. It notes the budding creationist legal response to this development. Assuming that biblical creationism could not be taught in public schools, Bryan sought neutrality through silence on the subject of biblical origins by excluding evolutionary teaching as well. This form of neutrality ended when the BSCS texts successfully reintroduced evolution as the central concept in biology instruction during the early 1960s. Meanwhile, the Schempp decision offered strong legal support for teaching creationism along with evolution.

This chapter examines the complex litigation over creation-science statutes, which culminated in the 1987 US Supreme Court decision against them in Aguillard v. Edwards. As the ultimate responsibility for resolving the dispute moved from the elected state legislators moved from the elected state legislators and judges to the appointed federal judiciary, persistent popular support for accommodating creationism in public education still influenced the law, but its impact became subtler. The ACLU moved first against the more vulnerable Arkansas law. In doing so, the ACLU generated the most dramatic creation-evolution legal confrontation since the Scopes confrontation mentioned in Chapter 3. In January 5, 1892, Judge Overton found that the new equal-time statute had an unconstitutional religious purpose and repudiated the Arkansas statute. Meanwhile, every brief opposing the Louisiana law asserted or assumed that creation science was solely religious and not scientific.

In September 1856, Pratt left Utah on his final mission, this time to the eastern states. His new wife Eleanor McComb Pratt accompanied him, hoping to retrieve her children from her parent’s home in New Orleans while Pratt preached in various eastern cities. Eleanor successfully recovered her children through a ruse and started for Utah through Texas and then Indian territory (now Oklahoma). This sent her estranged husband Hector McLean, motivated both by personal revenge and southern cultural notions of honor, to hunt for Pratt. McLean, with the help of friends and federal officials, found Pratt and Eleanor in Indian Territory. Though cleared by a federal court in Van Buren Arkansas, Pratt was subsequently killed by McLean. While much of the nation celebrated Pratt’s murder (citing an “unwritten” law that justified a man’s killing his wife’s “seducer”), the Latter-day Saints mourned Pratt as a martyr.

Dyess Colony, is a brief overview of the political history of Dyess and introduces the more important bosses associated with the colony. New Deal projects were largely under the operational control of bureaucrats who also maintained a lively political affiliation. The manipulation and shrewd politics practiced by Floyd Sharp allowed him to rise from a mid-level Arkansas bureaucrat to, arguably, one of the most secure of all the New Deal bosses. As other chapters will argue, the selection of the proper clients for the two New Deal projects was, in the minds of the bosses, critical to the potential success of the community. The transition from client selection by the Arkansas officials to the Resettlement Administration proved to be efficient, yet ineffective. The actual creation of the farms in the midst of wilderness swamps is remarkable, and its construction is noted and described. In this chapter most of the letters are attempts to gain full-time employment, the writers were trying to get on. The paternalism and supervision at Dyess was much more intrusive and severe than that at Tupelo; suspicion of government men and the inability to nail down a price caused consternation.

This chapter provides a historical background of Arkansas' prairies followed by a list of prairies by county. Each site is briefly described, followed by symbols showing site features, a brief location, and a phone number. Arkansas prairies are characterized by three natural divisions: alluvial plains, Arkansas Valley prairie, and Ozark Plateau. The almost 1 million-acre eastern Mississippi alluvial plain is now reduced to 600 acres. The almost 150,000-acre Arkansas Valley now numbers 2,200 acres. The almost 500,000-acre northwest Ozark Plateau now numbers only 160 acres.

This chapter traces the extraordinary role that evangelical Christian colleges and universities have played in propagating right-wing values that have aided in the Republicanization of the South. Through a case study of Harding College in Arkansas, the reader gains insight into the inculcation of a particular brand of “Americanism,” proper religion, and economic rightism that fortified political conservatism and helped break the South away from its decades-long allegiance to the Democratic Party. The roles of long-time Harding president George Benson and Professor James Bales are especially noteworthy. The chapter follows developments at Harding and connects them to the outside world, through the Cold War and anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, civil rights, racial unrest, and Vietnam in the 1960s, the culture changes of the 1970s, and the active involvement of the Religious Right in politics since 1980.

This chapter argues that neither the “southern strategy” (or “white backlash” thesis) nor newer Suburban School explanations adequately account for how and why the South became Republican. By focusing on the gubernatorial career of northern Republican Winthrop Rockefeller in Arkansas, the chapter rejects the “southern strategy” of appealing to the distinctive regional politics of the South and the “suburban strategy” of a regional convergence of shared, white middle-class suburban values across the country. The Arkansas example turns established wisdom on its head because, rather than appealing to southern racial conservatism, Rockefeller opposed a strong segregationist Democrat, actively sought black votes, and offered a genuine alternative of liberal, socially progressive reform and spending as a way to move a profoundly poor southern state forward. In doing so, the chapter argues, Rockefeller took a progressive “Republican road less traveled” and effectively set the political agenda in Arkansas for at least the next three decades.