Mark Christ
Host, Encyclopedia of Arkansas MinuteMark Christ produces and hosts Encyclopedia of Arkansas Minute on KUAR. He is head of adult programming for the Central Arkansas Library System. He previously served as community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, which he joined in 1990 after eight years as a journalist.
A 1982 graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, he received his Master’s degree in 2000 from the University of Oklahoma. The Arkansas Historical Association presented him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 and the Civil War Trust awarded him the 2013 State Preservation Leadership Award. He is president of the board of trustees of the Arkansas Historical Association, a former member of the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission and the Arkansas World War I Centennial Commemoration Committee, and former chairman of the board of directors of the Arkansas Humanities Council.
He has written, edited and co-edited several books including “Rugged and Sublime The Civil War in Arkansas,” “Sentinels of History: Reflections on Arkansas Properties Listed on the National Register of Historic Places,” which won an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History, “Getting Used To Being Shot At: The Spence Family Civil War Letters,” “All Cut to Pieces and Gone to Hell: The Civil War, Race Relations and the Battle of Poison Spring,” “The Earth Shook and Trees Trembled: Civil War Arkansas 1863-1864,” “Ready, Booted, and Spurred: Arkansas and the U.S.-Mexican War,” “The Die is Cast: Arkansas Goes to War, 1861,” “Civil War Arkansas, 1863: The Battle for a State,” which won the Military Order of the Stars and Bars' 2010 Douglas Southall Freeman Award and the Central Arkansas Library System's 2013 Booker Worthen Literary Prize, "This Day We Marched Again: A Union Soldier’s Account of War in Arkansas and the Trans-Mississippi Region,” “I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over: First Person Accounts of Civil War Arkansas from the Arkansas Historical Quarterly,” “Competing Memories: The Legacy of Arkansas’s Civil War” and “A Confused and Confusing Affair: Arkansas and Reconstruction.”
His next edited work, “The War At Home: Perspectives on the Arkansas Experience During World War I,” will be published in spring 2020 by the University of Arkansas Press. He has also written many articles for such publications as Civil War News, North and South, Blue and Gray, Arkansas Historical Quarterly and Pulaski County Historical Review. The Pulaski County Historical Society awarded him its Peg Smith-Mary Worthen Award for his article “’An Abolition Hole’: Life in Union Little Rock, 1863-1865.”
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A Chicot County native would become a college basketball star and a federal judge.
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A former slave became one of the most famous lawmen in U.S. history.
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For a decade Arkansas required blood donations to be labeled with the donor’s race.
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A Lincoln County family established an agricultural enterprise that found success in a time when independent Black farmers faced daunting obstacles.
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A Hot Spring County community can trace its roots to 1855, when the Brown family emigrated there and placed boxes over the sulfur, iron and copper springs in the area.
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Appalling weather affected both armies in Civil War Arkansas in the summer of 1863.
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A once popular Arkansas novelist is scarcely remembered today.
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Little Rock native became a pioneering Christian broadcaster.
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In 1971, Texas minister James Ellison founded The Covenant, The Sword and The Arm of the Lord, a white supremacist gang.
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