May 2019 – Mapping Renewal NEH Project Blog

Collection highlight: Metroplan records

By Acadia Roher Are you fascinated by the stories of how Little Rock has changed over time? A massive urban renewal effort from the 1950s to the mid-1970s is largely responsible for the city we navigate today. Urban renewal shifted…

Arthur Ashe, Winthrop Rockefeller, and the struggle for civil rights

By Acadia Roher I have been staring at, investigating, developing metadata, and writing about photographs in the Earl Saunders, Jr. photo collection for seven months now and still find myself startled by what I didn’t notice until the tenth or…

Segregated Neighborhoods, Segregated Schools

By Acadia Roher Resistance to school integration came in many forms, from outright mob violence to indirect tactics like housing discrimination that created segregated neighborhoods and thus segregated schools. In the decade leading up to Brown v. Board, Black communities…

Town and Country: Westward Sprawl in Little Rock (Part II)

By Andrew McClain Hi, everyone – I’m Andrew McClain, one of the graduate assistants at CAHC. I’ve written before about the residential growth patterns in Little Rock starting in the 1950s, but in this post, I’m talking about commercial development.…

Fleeing Downtown: White Western Suburbs

By Acadia Roher My walk over to the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture from the free parking area downtown always takes me under the thundering overpasses and exit ramps of I-30. Long before the debate over…

Town and Country: Westward Sprawl in Little Rock (Part I)

By Andrew McClain I’m Andrew, a Little Rock native, freelance journalist and archival assistant working on the Mapping Renewal project. During my first postgraduate career as a delivery driver, I saw far corners of Little Rock that I had never…

Month: May 2019