Slavery in Arkansas #2

Arkansas Tech University professor Kelly Houston Jones’s new book, A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas, was recently published by the University of Georgia Press. Jones challenges the received wisdom about the geographical coordinates of slavery in Arkansas, which are often portrayed as being a stark division between the Delta lowlands and the northwest highlands. Rather, Jones places an emphasis on Arkansas’s waterways as “the ribbons of agricultural life” that knitted the two areas together and defined a more complex and nuanced terrain of slavery that encompassed large portions of the state.