The history of Arkansas began millennia ago when humans first crossed into North America. Many tribes used Arkansas as their hunting lands but the main tribe was the Quapaw who settled in Arkansas River delta upon moving south from Illinois. Early French explorers gave the territory its name, a corruption of Akansea, which is a phonetic spelling of the Illinois word for the Quapaw. What began as a rough wilderness inhabited by trappers and hunters became incorporated into the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and became Arkansas Territory in 1819. Upon gaining statehood in 1836, Arkansas began to prosper under a plantation economy that was heavily reliant on slave labor.
Read more about History Of Arkansas: Louisiana Purchase and Territorial Status, Statehood and Antebellum Arkansas, Civil War, Reconstruction
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“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)