In this history of African American society from the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War I, Fon Louise Gordon focuses on dissent within Arkansas's black community. In particular, Gordon studies friction between elites and the agricultural and laboring classes over ideological and procedural aspects of their response to the caste strictures of Jim Crow. Because opinions on how to oppose segregation and disfranchisement ran along class lines, Gordon is also able to offer one of the most discerning portrayals to date of that era's black society. It was, Gordon demonstrates, a society apart from mainstream America, yet similar in its stratification. Through individual profiles and numerous examples, Gordon shows how class within the black community was determined by skin color, family background, and education in combination with such indicators of status as occupation and religious affiliation. At the same time, Caste and Class tells two concurrent and closely linked stories. One story is of the rise, growing self-absorption, and finally flagging influence of Arkansas's first black middle and upper classes. Primarily urban, professional, and conservative, these elites were relatively insulated from white oppression and supported the conciliatory race policies of Booker T. Washington. The other story Gordon tells is of the long, arduous emergence of the working classes, which was brought on in part by an exposure to a wider range of opportunities during and after World War I and the birth of the New Negro Movement. Overwhelmingly rural, these blacks were isolated from black middle-class culture and values and were oriented toward agitation and protest. In general, Gordon shows, the upper classes sought stability and prosperity apart from the white power structure, while the lower classes sought to improve their lives in spite of it. Within the context of national trends and events, Gordon discusses such topics as the myth and reality of Arkansas as a promised land of racial tolerance, the antebellum roots of black stratified society, the formation of Arkansas's all-black communities, and the emigration of the lower classes to Africa and the industrial North and Midwest. Caste and Class moves beyond monolithic views of white oppression and black victimization to portray African American community-building in the era that saw the collapse of agriculture as the dominant way of life for African Americans.

Drawing on court records, newspaper accounts, penitentiary records, letters, and diaries, White Man’s Heaven is a thorough investigation into the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kimberly Harper explores events in the towns of Monett, Pierce City, Joplin, and Springfield, Missouri, and Harrison, Arkansas, to show how post–Civil War vigilantism, an established tradition of extralegal violence, and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era happened independently but were also part of a larger, interconnected regional experience. Even though some whites, especially in Joplin and Springfield, tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.

Bullets and Fire is the first collection on lynching in Arkansas, exploring all corners of the state from the time of slavery up to the mid-twentieth century and covering stories of the perpetrators, victims, and those who fought against vigilante violence. Among the topics discussed are the lynching of slaves, the Arkansas Council of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the 1927 lynching of John Carter in Little Rock, and the state’s long opposition to a federal anti-lynching law. Throughout, the work reveals how the phenomenon of lynching—as the means by which a system of white supremacy reified itself, with its perpetrators rarely punished and its defenders never condemned—served to construct authority in Arkansas. Bullets and Fire will add depth to the growing body of literature on American lynching and integrate a deeper understanding of this violence into Arkansas history.

Whayne also offers an analysis of the forces at work on the local level. She suggests that concerted opposition to modernization existed even before New Deal programs gave power to the planters in the 1930s. She also demonstrates that the Arkansas delta experienced many of the same conflicts based on social class and racial caste that were evident in former slaveholding areas.

Surveying the entire span of southern political history, Michael Perman takes a revealing and wide-ranging approach to the regions politics. During the nineteenth century, the South experienced nearly continuous political crisis from nullification through secession, war, and Reconstruction, concluding with the disfranchisement campaigns at centu...