Summer Sale! Arkansas History Award Winners

The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to offer its Arkansas history award winning titles at 40% off for summer 2024. New books and timeless classics—winners of the Ragsdale Award, Graves Award, Booker Worthen Prize, and others—are on sale to give readers a chance to brush up on the history of the natural state.

The newest titles included in the sale are Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912–1956 by John Kirk, and Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta: Essays to Mark the Centennial of the Elaine Massacre, edited by Michael Pierce and Calvin White. John Kirk’s biography of Winthrop Rockefeller won the 2024 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association, given to the year’s best book on Arkansas history. In this richly detailed biography, Kirk examines the questions of why Rockefeller, scion of one of the most powerful families in American history, left New York for an Arkansas mountaintop in the 1950s.

“Kirk has produced a … sympathetic, deeply researched, and balanced account of Winthrop Rockefeller’s early life,” wrote David Stebenne in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. “Kirk’s book does much to demolish the conventional view of Winthrop Rockefeller as a nonentity whose unhappy marriage and stormy divorce prompted him to leave New York and become a cattle rancher in Arkansas. What emerges instead is a portrait of an upper-class person who was something of a misfit in the world from which he came and found another one where he fit better as a result of the larger changes in American life associated with the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.”

Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta: Essays to Mark the Centennial of the Elaine Massacre, edited by Michael Pierce and Calvin White, examines the history of labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from the Civil War into the late twentieth century. It won the 2024 John William Graves Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association, given every two years for the best book on the history of race in Arkansas. Reviewing the book in the Journal of Southern History, Evan Howard Ashford wrote “Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta contributes to the fields of United States history, southern history, African American history, and Arkansas history by adding a much-needed intersectional analysis of the power struggle between Black and white in areas like gender, economics, and politics. The volume also connects Arkansas’s role in the Black freedom struggle to a larger narrative that expands the many ways to study African Americans’ quest for freedom and equality.”

Country Boy; The Roots of Johnny Cash by Colin Edward Woodward was the winner of the 2023 Ragsdale Award, and The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas by Kenneth Barnes was the 2022 winner. Barnes’s previous book, Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas, won the 2017 Ragsdale. Other favorites include A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas by Billy Higgins, The Rumble of a Distant Drum by Morris Arnold, and Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919, by Grif Stockley, Guy Lancaster, and Brian Mitchell.

The University of Arkansas Press, founded by historian Willard Gatewood and poet Miller Williams, has publishing important Arkansas history as a core and enduring value. Books that examine, record, and recontextualize Arkansas history are a cornerstone of the Press’s editorial program. The Arkansas History Summer Sale puts these books—the stories of the people, politicians, spaces, and moments of Arkansas—in the forefront.

The full list of titles included in the sale follows. Use code SUMMER24 at checkout or call 800-621-2736 to order.