University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Evenings with History

The 2011-2012 Series

The University History Institute

You have a unique opportunity to share in the excitement of historical discovery through the twenty-first annual Evenings with History series.

 

The Evenings with History series, sponsored by the University History Institute, features presentations by UALR faculty members sharing their current historical research. Although these talks are aimed at a general audience, each offers insight into the real workings of historical scholarship.  The nationally-recognized series covers a variety of times, areas, and subjects.  Many of the presentations illuminate current affairs.  The format also allows for questions and discussion.

This year the first three lectures constitute a mini-series within this year’s program, focusing on the struggle of African-Americans in Arkansas to secure full freedom. These lectures are given to mark the inauguration of the University’s new Institute on Race and Ethnicity. Subsequent talks will allow you to discover the impact of an Arkansas missionary on emerging Chinese nationalism; examine rival interpretations of the emergence of the idea of human rights; and learn about Alexander the Great’s methods for dealing with insurgency in his empire.

The six sessions of the 2011-2012 Evenings with History series will be on the first Tuesdays in October, November, December of 2011, and February, March, and April, 2012. These lectures will be held at the Ottenheimer Auditorium in the Historic Arkansas Museum at 200 E. Third Street in Little Rock.  Historic Arkansas’s downtown location and the museum’s adjacent parking lot at Third and Cumberland make the sessions convenient and pleasant to attend.   Refreshments and an informal atmosphere encourage the interchange of ideas.  Refreshments are served at 7:00 p.m., and the talk begins at 7:30 p.m.

Come experience the joy of history in a truly historic setting!

An individual subscription to the series, at $50 annually, includes these benefits:

–Admission to all six lectures.

A joint subscription to the series, at $90 annually, offers couples and friends a savings of $10.

A Fellow of the Institute, at $250 annually, receives admission to the six lectures plus an invitation to special presentations for Fellows only. This often includes a private evening with a noted author.

The Institute also offers a Life Membership at $1,000.

Subscribers to the series help support historical research.  The presenters donate their time, and the University History Institute uses all proceeds from the series to encourage research at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.  In recent years annual Institute grants, made possible by the Evenings with History series, have made major purchases of historical research materials for UALR.  Subscriptions and donations to the Institute are tax deductible as allowed by law.

 

October 4— Carl Moneyhon. “Freedom: Black Arkansans and the End of Slavery”

The American Civil War brought an end to slavery, securing freedom for three million African American slaves. Freedom did not bring equality nor even full liberty, as many whites fought to retain some control over the lives of these new freedmen. The result was a continuing struggle in which blacks and whites maneuvered to define precisely what the end of slavery meant for those who had been enslaved. This talk examines that struggle as it took place in Arkansas, looking at how black freedom came to be defined in this tumultuous period and the legacy that solution left the future to face.

November 1– Story Matkin-Rawn (Special Guest Lecturer-University of Central Arkansas) “From Land Ownership to Legal Defense: The World War I Watershed in Black Arkansan Organizing”

Soaring agricultural prices during the First World War should have helped lift thousands of black Arkansan families from indebted sharecropping to independent farming.  But labor exploitation and fraud cut many black families off from the benefits of wartime prosperity.  Hundreds of African American farmers organized in the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union to confront these obstacles, but the Elaine Massacre destroyed their movement, claimed scores of African American lives, and crushed many black Arkansans’ hopes that their state would become the southern haven of small farmers.  This tragedy, however, marked a beginning as well as an ending.  This talk traces how a rising generation of activists regrouped from broken wartime promises and white terrorism to create new strategies, new networks, a new vision, and indeed, “New Negroes” who would confront white supremacy through a constellation of statewide political, civic, and legal justice campaigns.

December 6– John Kirk. “A Movement is more than a Moment: Arkansas and the African American Civil Rights Struggle since 1940″

For many observers the history of the civil rights movement in Arkansas has been forever captured in the iconic photograph taken by Will Counts of Hazel Bryan hurling abuse at Elizabeth Eckford on the first day of integrated classes at Central High School. Just as the image has come to stand for the Little Rock Crisis, so the Little Rock Crisis has come to stand for the civil rights movement in Arkansas. Yet as many historians in many states have discovered, the momentary flashpoints of the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s were often just a glimpse of a much longer and more complex struggle for freedom and equality that unfolded over many decades. This Evenings with History talk will examine the long civil rights movement in Arkansas, locating the 1957 Little Rock Central High Crisis within a much longer, deeper and richer civil rights history in the state that at key points overlapped with and echoed broader regional and national developments.

February 7, 2011– Jeff Kyong-McClain. “The Heavenly History of the Han, or How a Liberal Baptist from Green Forest, Arkansas Taught Racial and Ethnic Nationalism to the Chinese”

In the early years of the twentieth century, Chinese (or “Han”) nationalists were searching for ways to convert a tradition-bound and multi-cultural empire into a modern nation-state. Although, in the minds of these nationalists, foreign missionaries were a big part of China’s problem, many such missionaries in fact aided the Chinese against the non-Chinese in questions over who had the historical right to rule the borderlands, thereby helping Chinese nationalists assert their purported rights over vast amounts of territory. This talk looks at the case of one missionary particularly active in this regard, Arkansan D.C. Graham, who blended liberal theology with a Social Darwinian belief in the superiority of the Chinese over the other people groups in the region (southwest China). Graham propagated this belief as the pioneer of modern archaeology and ethnography in Sichuan province in the 1920s and 1930s, and his ideas remain influential in the region to this day.

March 6– Charles Romney. “A Brief History of Human Rights”

What are Human Rights? Some claim humans have always had rights that cannot be traded, infringed, or given away. Others argue international organizations and American officials invented the concept of human rights in the 1970s to further various political agendas. In this Evening with History we will discuss the two historical interpretations behind each vision of human rights, assess the relative strength of both ideas of international rights, and explore the political and intellectual stakes in the debate over the origins of Human Rights.

April 3– Edward Anson. “Counter-Insurgency: The Lessons of Alexander the Great”

During Alexander the Great’s conquering expedition, which took him from Greece to Egypt to the Punjab, he only endured one serious insurrection against his once established authority.  This talk shows how he dealt with the peoples of the areas he conquered, mollifying them through the retention of basic political, cultural, and religious institutions and establishing close bonds with local elites. Why, then, did his policy fail in the one instance that produced an insurgency? The talk assesses that failure and examines the brutal counter-insurgent measures employed by Alexander to deal with this resistance to his authority.

Special thanks to corporate sponsors for the 2011-2012 season—Delta Trust, Union Pacific Railroad, the Little Rock School District—Teaching American History Program; the law firms of  Friday, Eldredge, & Clark and Wright, Lindsey & Jennings. Also thanks for support and gifts in kind from the Ottenheimer Library; Historic Arkansas Museum, a museum of the Department of Arkansas Heritage; UALR Public Radio–KLRE-KUAR; and Grapevine Spirits.