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.

Partly because its colonial settlements were tiny, remote, and inconsequential, the early history of Arkansas has been almost entirely neglected. Even Arkansas Post, the principal eighteenth-century settlement, served mainly as a temporary place of residence for trappers and voyageurs. It was also an entrepot for travelers on the Mississippi-a place to be while on the way elsewhere. Only a very few inhabitants, true agricultural settlers, ever established themselves a or around the Post. For most of the eighteenth century, Arkansas's non-Indian population was less than one hundred, and never much exceeded five or six hundred. Its European residents of that era, mostly French, have left virtually no physical trace: the oldest buildings and the oldest marked graves in the state date from the 1820s. Drawing on original French and Spanish archival sources, Morris Arnold chronicles for the first time the legal institutions of colonial Arkansas, the attitude of its population towards European legal ideas as were current in Arkansas when Louisiana was transferred to the United States in 1803. Because he views the clash of legal traditions in the upper reaches of the Jefferson's Louisiana as part of a more general cultural conflict, Arnold closely examines the social and economic characteristics of Arkansas's early residents in order to explain why, following the American takeover, the common law was introduced into Arkansas with such relative ease.