Distilled from Arkansas: A Narrative History, the definitive work on the subject since its original publication in 2002, Arkansas: A Concise History is a succinct one-volume history of the state from the prehistory period to the near-present. Featuring four historians who have published extensively on a range of topics, the volume introduces readers to the major issues that have confronted the state and traces the evolution of those issues across time. The book begins by situating the state geographically and geologically and then moves on to chapters covering prehistory and precolonial periods. These chapters, written by George Sabo III, director of the Arkansas Archaeological Survey, ground the reader in the important background of native peoples and their lifeways. Judge Morris S. Arnold's chapter on the colonial period portrays the colonial French and Spanish era and the interaction of those Europeans with Native Americans, particularly the Quapaw Indians. Civil War historian Tom DeBlack covers the territorial era, early statehood, antebellum, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Jeannie Whayne covers the period following Reconstruction including the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, World War I, the Elaine Race Massacre, the Great Depression, WorldWar II and its aftermath, the Civil Rights movement, bringing the book into the early twenty-first century. Linking these moments together and placing an emphasis on how economic decisions have informed Arkansas's history, Arkansas: A Concise History puts perspective on the political and economic realities the state continues to face today.

Jeannie M. Whayne traces the emergence of a transformed southern plantation system in the Arkansas delta decades after the end of the Civil War. By manipulating laws and federal and state agencies to gain control over land policy, Poinsett County planters fought to maintain their place on the land amidst tenancy, sharecropping, and the mechanization of farming.