Arkansas is one of the fifty states that, together with Washington D.C., form the United States of America. Its capital and most populous city is Little Rock.
It is located in the southern region of the country, in the Central Southwest division. It is bordered to the north by Missouri, to the east by the Mississippi River that separates it from Tennessee and Mississippi, to the south by Louisiana, to the southwest by Texas and to the west by Oklahoma. It was admitted to the Union on June 15, 1836, as the 25th state.
Apart from the eastern border formed by the Mississippi River, the Arkansas River runs east through its territory. The state’s name is derived from the word kansas (the Algonquin Indian term for the Quapaw Indians), as pronounced by the French in the 17th century.3 The state’s diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozarks and Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested land in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta. Known as «The Natural State,» Arkansas’ diverse regions offer residents and tourists a variety of outdoor recreation opportunities.
The earliest signs of human habitation in Arkansas date back to 10,000 B.C., with remains found on the Ozark Plateau and along the banks of the White River; traces of Toltec-related groups have also been located southeast of Little Rock.
The lands of the present state of Arkansas have been inhabited by the Quapaw, Caddo, Osage, Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes. The Cherokees who resided in Arkansas were originally from Mississippi, from where they were expelled by the federal authorities and assigned to reservations in this territory at the beginning of the 19th century.
The Spanish were the first Europeans to explore the lands of Arkansas, when Hernando de Soto arrived in 1541. French explorations of the region of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers began in the 17th century. The Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and the fur trader Louis Jolliet contributed, in 1673, to making the Europeans aware of both the geography of this state and the hostility of the Indians who inhabited it. In 1680, La Salle explored part of the territory when he sailed along the Mississippi River on his way to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. These expeditions culminated in the French claiming of the Louisiana Territory in 1682, which included the present-day state of Arkansas. French settlement then began, as the southern part of the Mississippi Valley along the Arkansas and White Rivers began to be populated.
For thirty-seven years Arkansas was under Spanish rule, since in 1763, after the Seven Years’ War, France ceded Louisiana (and therefore this territory) to Spain. Between 1769 and 1777, Governor Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga ‘le Conciliateur’ encouraged the exploration and colonization of the territories of the Arkansas River, then under the jurisdiction of the extensive province of Louisiana, since it meant, on the one hand, the reinforcement of the border region of the Mississippi River against a possible British attack, and on the other hand to improve connectivity between the city of Saint Louis, Illinois, recently founded in 1767 by the merchant Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, with San Antonio de Béjar in Texas; To this end, Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga would have Athanase de Mezières as commander of the Post of Charles III of Arkansas or Arkansas Post, who would be his agent in matters with the Caddo tribes (see San Luis de los Cadodachos) and with the Quapaw, Osage and Túnica Amerindians, with whom Unzaga would manage to maintain good commercial and neighborly relations to the point that during the secret aid that Luis de Unzaga y Amézaga provided to the North American colonists between 1775 and 1777, these tribes served as allies of King Charles III and the Bourbon interests, an alliance between France-Spain-Italy in favor of the birth of the USA4. In 1800, France recovered Louisiana to sell it three years later to the United States. In 1806, the District of Arkansas was created as part of the Louisiana Territory. The United States Congress, which exercised governing power over the dependent territories, later decided to reorganize the administration of these territories, after which Arkansas became part of the Missouri Territory. In 1819, Arkansas finally acquired Territory status, the first step in beginning negotiations for its admission as a sovereign state into the Union. The process of Arkansas acquiring statehood depended, however, on the admission of another state, since the Missouri Compromise stipulated that new stars would only be added to the flag if the balance between slave and free states was not broken. Following the admissions of Maine (free) in 1820 and Missouri (slave) in 1821, no new states were admitted to the Union until June 15, 1836, when Arkansas was admitted as a slave state, followed by Michigan in 1837 as a free state. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Arkansas joined the Union, a contradiction that was later corrected when Lincoln tried to get Arkansas to recruit troops and its representatives decided to support the Confederacy. Following this change of allegiance, several battles for control of the Mississippi Valley took place in the territory, the most important being in the northwest of the state, at Pea Ridge. In 1863, the Unionists took Little Rock; from then until 1865, Arkansas remained physically and humanly divided between Confederates and Unionists until the end of the war in 1865.
The state’s economy grew during the final decades of the 19th century, thanks to the railway and the discovery of bauxite deposits. Later, in the 1920s, the discovery of oil supplemented its agrarian economy, based mainly on rice and soybean cultivation. The economic crisis of the 1930s and the continuous droughts had a devastating effect on the state, which nevertheless managed to recover thanks to the fact that the Second World War created a great demand for its primary products, both mining and agricultural. With the end of the World War, the process of racial desegregation began, which proved especially contentious in some southern states. One of the most momentous moments in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States occurred in Arkansas, when President Eisenhower had to send troops to prevent the governor of Arkansas, Orval E. Faubus, from using the National Guard to prevent the entry of black students into legally desegregated schools, as stipulated by the Supreme Court in 1958.
Arkansas’s economy grew after World War II thanks to the work of the financier and later politician Winthrop Rockefeller, who attracted numerous industries before and after he was elected governor in 1966. However, the greatest economic milestone in recent decades was the launch in 1970 of the Arkansas River Development Program, which has made navigation possible from this river to the Mississippi. The most prominent figure in Arkansas’ history has been Bill Clinton, who governed the state for two terms. Clinton left office in 1992, when he became President of the United States, a position to which he was re-elected in 1996.