Arkansas has frequently been omitted from surveys of the South and from national history. One reason has been the limited archival resources; another, the absence of a university press. Recently, however, archives have proliferated, and a solid mass of scholarship has come from the University of Arkansas Press and the Arkansas Historical Society. This bibliography shows that there is no shortage of research materials on Arkansas. The only full bibliography on Arkansas, it provides an essential guide for historians and librarians wishing to bring Arkansas into the mainstream of America history.

The volume provides a guide to the growing literature on Arkansas rich prehistory and to the pre-American colonial period, which lasted some 250 years. Two chapters focus on the statehood period. The volume then includes a series of topical chapters covering such subjects as minorities, business and economics, education, social history, and cultural and intellectual areas. There are also separate chapters on local and county history, general histories, archives and museums, and historic sites. The volume opens with a short chronology and provides subject and author indexes.

Adventure, danger, romance - Mifflin W. Gibbs seemed to invite them in his determination to better himself. He staked out considerable success as an entrepreneur and public voice in the American West before moving on to other frontiers. In California, where he had gone to seek his fortune, he was politically active, protesting the poll tax, editing a newspaper, and generally speaking out. After exile in Canada, necessitated by his civil-rights agitation and the political climate, Gibbs returned to the United States in 1869 - to Oberlin, Ohio, where he earned a degree in law. Then he went to Little Rock, Arkansas, serving as a judge until his appointment as U.S. Consul to Madagascar in 1897. Shadow and Light offers many historical sidelights - on the underground railroad young Gibbs knew first hand, the abolition movement, the Spanish-American War, and nineteenth-century race relations. Acting always on his concern for what he called "the progress of the race", Gibbs won the support and friendship of leaders as diverse as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.