A man squanders his family fortune until he is penniless, loses every time he runs for public office, and yet is so admired by the people of Arkansas that the General Assembly names a county in his honor. A renowned writer makes her home in the basement of a museum until she is sued by some of the most prominent women of the state regarding the use of the rooms upstairs. A brilliant inventor who nearly built the first airplane is also vilified for his eccentricity and possible madness. Author Steven Teske rummages through Arkansas’s colorful past to find--and "unvarnish"--some of the state’s most controversial and fascinating figures. The nine people featured in this collection are not the most celebrated products of Arkansas. More than half of them were not even born in Arkansas, although all of them lived in Arkansas and contributed to its history and culture. But each of them has achieved a certain stature in local folklore, if not in the story of the state as a whole.

Calhoun was born a “true son of the Deep South.” He came of age during the Great Depression and learned to plow a mule. He became an astute observer of, and participant in, race relations in the ’40s and ’50s, was almost a moonshiner, lived as a sharecropper, and married the girl of his dreams. The latter part of the book has to do with the situations and people he met in his various jobs, mainly with his railroad days. It’s a wonder he’s around to relate all these tales!

As a way to comment on a person’s style or taste, the word “tacky” has distinctly southern origins, with its roots tracing back to the so-called “tackies” who tacked horses on South Carolina farms prior to the Civil War. The Tacky South presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that examine connections between tackiness and the American South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake and the ubiquitous influence of Dolly Parton. Charting the gender, race, and class constructions at work in regional aesthetics, The Tacky South explores what shifting notions of tackiness reveal about US culture as a whole and the role that region plays in addressing national and global issues of culture and identity.

Everyone, including native Arkansans, may be surprised to find out how many famous and fascinating people come from or have strong ties to the state. Natural State Notables profiles twenty-one such people, including musicians, athletes, business leaders, and public servants. Readers will learn about a famous surgeon who was a pioneer in kidney transplantation, a woman who kept a hospital open during the Depression, and a teacher who wrote a famous song to match a history lesson. Featured are poor people who worked hard to become successful and a rich man who moved to Arkansas, fell in love with the state, and made it better. All of these people are “Natural State Notables” who helped make Arkansas what it is today.

In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. In 1930 his Atlanta World became a semiweekly, and the following year W. A. began to implement his vision for a massive newspaper chain based out of Atlanta: the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later dubbed the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. In April 1931 the World had become a triweekly, and its reach began drifting beyond the South. With The Grapevine of the Black South, Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, from its roots in the 1930s through its end in the 1950s. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the black press during the period leading up to the classic civil rights era (1955-68). In the generation that followed, the Syndicate helped formalize knowledge among the African American population in the South. As the civil rights movement exploded throughout the region, black southerners found a collective identity in that struggle built on the commonality of the news and the subsequent interpretation of that news. Or as Gunnar Myrdal explained, the press was "the chief agency of group control. It [told] the individual how he should think and feel as an American Negro and create[d] a tremendous power of suggestion by implying that all other Negroes think and feel in this manner." It didn't create a complete homogeneity in black southern thinking, but it gave thinkers a similar set of tools from which to draw.

This book’s predecessor, The Grapevine of the Black South, emphasized the owners of the Atlanta Daily World and its operation of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate between 1931 and 1955. In a pragmatic effort to avoid racial confrontation developing from white fear, newspaper editors developed a practical radicalism that argued on the fringes of racial hegemony, saving their loudest vitriol for tyranny that was not local and thus left no stake in the game for would-be white saboteurs. Thomas Aiello reexamined historical thinking about the Depression-era Black South, the information flow of the Great Migration, the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism, and even the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the civil rights movement. With Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration, Aiello continues that analysis by tracing the development and trajectory of the individual newspapers of the Syndicate, evaluating those with surviving issues, and presenting them as they existed in proximity to their Atlanta hub. In so doing, he emphasizes the thread of practical radicalism that ran through Syndicate editorial policy. Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration is a supplement to The Grapevine of the Black South, providing a fuller picture of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Black press in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

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.