Arkansas

The area was first inhabited around 11,500 BC, during the Paleoindian Period; mound building emerged during the Archaic Period, and by the Mississippian Period Native groups practiced extensive agriculture and lived in large villages linked by long-distance trade. In the 1500s the Caddo, Osage and Quapaw peoples lived in the region.⁠[1][2]

For thousands of years American Indians came to the Hot Springs area to quarry novaculite for tools and weapons; the Caddo built mounds in the south, and the Delta is home to the Toltec Mounds.⁠[3][1]

Hernando de Soto explored the region in 1541–1542. His expedition brought disease and violence to the Native peoples, but also produced the first written accounts of Arkansas’s Native groups.⁠[2][1]

In 1673 Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette reached the mouth of the Arkansas River and helped establish peaceful relations with the Quapaw.⁠[2][1]

Henri de Tonty built Arkansas Post in 1686. For more than a century it served France and later Spain, though large-scale colonization never took place. France ceded the region to Spain in 1762, regained it in 1800 and sold it to the United States in 1803.⁠[2][1]

The U.S. Senate approved the Louisiana Purchase on October 31, 1803, and France gave up possession at New Orleans on December 20. On March 23, 1804, Army Lieutenant James Many took control of Arkansas Post, and on March 26 Congress divided LouisianaLouisianaLouisiana is a state in the southern United States on the Gulf of Mexico, bordered by Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas; its capital is Baton Rouge and its largest city is New Orleans. It entered the Union on April 30, 1812, as the 18th state, and had a population of 4,657,757 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry at the 33rd parallel into the Territory of Orleans and the District of Louisiana.⁠[4]

The New Madrid Earthquakes struck in 1811–1812. In 1812 the region became part of Missouri Territory.⁠[4][2]

Congress created Arkansas Territory on March 2, 1819; its first territorial governor was James Miller. The 1820 territorial census counted 14,273 people, not including the Cherokee.⁠[4]

On June 1, 1821, the territorial capital moved from Arkansas Post to Little Rock.⁠[4]

In 1824 the Western Cherokee set up their own government, and a treaty with the Choctaw defined the territory’s western boundary. An 1825 treaty sent the Quapaw to the Red River area in Louisiana, and the Choctaw were moved farther west; an 1828 treaty removed the Cherokee from Arkansas into Indian Territory, and an 1833 treaty removed the remaining Quapaw to Indian Territory.⁠[4]

The territory’s population reached 30,388 in 1830 and 52,240 in 1835. In 1833 about 130 German immigrants arrived in Little Rock as a group.⁠[4]

On April 20, 1832, President Andrew Jackson signed legislation setting aside the hot springs and nearby land for future federal use; the Hot Springs Reservation is among the oldest federally protected sites in the United States.⁠[3][5]

The first state constitution was ratified by Congress on January 30, 1836. It was brief and flexible, recognized slavery, and gave the vote to all free adult white males. Arkansas was admitted paired with MichiganMichiganMichigan is a state of the United States nearly surrounded by the Great Lakes and made up of the Upper and Lower peninsulas; its capital is Lansing and its largest city is Detroit. It was admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the 26th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 10,077,331.Open the full entry to keep the balance between slave and free states, and state government began on September 13, 1836.⁠[6][4]

The first constitution created a three-judge supreme court chosen by the General Assembly; its first judges were Daniel Ringo, Townsend Dickinson and Thomas J. Lacy, with Ringo as the first chief justice.⁠[7]

The Panic of 1837 undermined the state banks. Arkansas became the frontier of the South’s cotton kingdom, which depended on enslaved labor, and the Swamp Lands Act of 1850 transferred millions of acres to the state. The population was 97,974 in 1840, 209,987 in 1850 and 435,450 in 1860.⁠[4][1]

In 1860 the state held more than 110,000 enslaved people, about 26 percent of its population, and the Black population exceeded 70 percent in Chicot and Lafayette counties. Only about 12 percent of slaveowners held twenty or more enslaved people.⁠[8][4]

After Abraham LincolnAbraham LincolnAbraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the 16th president of the United States (1861–1865). Born to a frontier farming family in Kentucky, he had less than a year of formal schooling, taught himself law, and served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives before winning the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1860. During the Civil War he preserved the Union, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and pushed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. He was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, and died the next day.Open the full entry’s election in 1860 the Secession Convention at first rejected secession; after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, delegates voted for secession on May 6, 1861, by a final vote of 69 to 1, Isaac Murphy casting the only dissenting vote. The second state constitution, adopted afterward, was largely the same as the first, with references to the United States replaced by the Confederate States of America.⁠[8][9][6]

Although Arkansas had the third-smallest white population in the Confederacy, it supplied more Union troops than any other Confederate state except TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry, and the Arkansas Peace Society resisted secession in the north-central mountains.⁠[8]

Union forces won the Battle of Pea Ridge in northwest Arkansas on March 7–8, 1862, leaving the state largely defenseless as Confederate forces withdrew east of the Mississippi River. At Prairie Grove on December 7, 1862, Thomas Hindman’s Confederate army fought Union forces to a tactical draw, with each side suffering more than 1,350 casualties.⁠[8]

On January 9–11, 1863, a Union force of more than 50,000 overwhelmed Fort Hindman at Arkansas Post, capturing nearly 4,800 of its roughly 5,000 Confederate defenders. On July 4 a Confederate attack on Helena failed with more than 1,600 casualties. On September 10, after a Union victory in the Engagement at Bayou Fourche, the Confederate army abandoned Little Rock, and the Confederate state government moved to Washington, in Hempstead County, for the rest of the war.⁠[9][8]

Under Lincoln’s wartime reconstruction plan, Unionists adopted a third state constitution on January 19, 1864, ratified on March 14; it abolished slavery, repudiated secession and created the office of lieutenant governor. Isaac Murphy became governor. In the Camden Expedition that April, Union forces occupied Camden, were ambushed at Poison Spring (April 18) and Marks’ Mill, and retreated to Little Rock by May 3.⁠[6][8]

Most of Arkansas’s active Confederate soldiers surrendered with M. Jeff Thompson on May 11, 1865; Confederate forces in the Trans-Mississippi Theater did not officially surrender until June 2, 1865.⁠[9]

On March 13, 1868, the Reconstruction legislature ratified a fourth constitution that declared racial discrimination illegal, gave adult African American men the vote, established free public schools and greatly expanded the governor’s powers. Arkansas was readmitted to the Union on June 22, 1868, and Republican Powell Clayton, a former Union officer, took office as governor.⁠[6][8]

Ku Klux Klan terror spread across the state in 1868; Clayton declared martial law and used the militia against the Klan, and martial law ended in Crittenden County on March 21, 1869.⁠[8]

Republicans split between Joseph Brooks and Elisha Baxter; after a court ruled for Brooks on April 15, 1874, armed factions clashed until President Ulysses S. Grant backed Baxter on May 15.⁠[8]

On October 13, 1874, voters approved a fifth constitution, the one still in force, by about three to one. It limited state taxing and borrowing, shortened terms of office to two years, limited legislative sessions to sixty days every two years, reduced the governor’s appointment power and strengthened county governments; more than 100 amendments have since been adopted. Augustus Garland won the governorship, and Reconstruction came to an end.⁠[6][8]

Railroads connected Arkansas to Southern and national markets, helping the timber and mining industries grow. Farmers faced falling prices, and the Greenback Party and the Agricultural Wheel challenged Democratic rule; Democrats then passed laws that stripped many of their supporters of the vote and expanded legal and social segregation.⁠[1]

In 1912 the Pine Bluff chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, learning that Arkansas had no state flag, began a statewide design contest that drew about sixty-five entries; a committee chaired by Secretary of State Earle W. Hodges chose the design of Willie Kavanaugh Hocker of Wabbaseka. The General Assembly adopted it as the official state flag on February 26, 1913.⁠[10][11]

The flag has a red field with a white diamond bordered by 25 white stars, marking Arkansas as the 25th state, the diamond standing for the nation’s first diamond-producing state; the three blue stars below “ARKANSAS” stand for France, Spain and the United States, which held the land before statehood, and the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, while the single star above commemorates the state’s membership in the Confederacy (1861–1865). A fourth star was added in 1923, and in 1924 the legislature adopted the present arrangement of three stars below the name and one above.⁠[11][10]

Progressive reforms included a prohibition measure in 1917 and, the same year, women’s participation in the Democratic primary. The state also established four agricultural schools that later became universities.⁠[1]

Violence marked the era: white rioters drove Black residents out of Harrison, and in 1919 white planters and soldiers killed an unknown number, possibly hundreds, of Black sharecroppers in Elaine.⁠[1]

On March 4, 1921, Congress renamed the Hot Springs Reservation as Hot Springs National Park, the 18th national park in the country. Its thermal water, about 4,400 years old, emerges from 47 springs, and the park receives nearly 1.5 million visitors a year.⁠[5]

The 1927 flood devastated Delta farmland and the Depression worsened conditions, along with drought in the 1930s. The integrated Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union emerged, foreshadowing the civil rights movement and influencing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s farm policy.⁠[1][2]

During World War II Arkansans served in the military and worked in new ordnance plants, continuing industrialization, while many others, including many African Americans, left the state for work. From October 1942 to November 1945 about 16,000 Japanese Americans were interned in two camps in Arkansas.⁠[1]

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled school segregation unconstitutional in BrownBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry v. Board of Education. On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard at Central High School; on September 4 nine African American students were turned back by Guard troops, and Elizabeth Eckford was confronted by a mob. On September 23 the students entered the school under police escort but were removed hours later.⁠[12]

On September 24 President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 1,000-member 327th Airborne Battle Group of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, and at 9:22 a.m. on September 25 the “Little Rock Nine” were escorted through the front doors by its soldiers. On May 27, 1958, Ernest Green became the first African American student to graduate from Central High. On September 12, 1958, Faubus ordered Little Rock’s four high schools closed, and they stayed closed until August 12, 1959.⁠[12]

Sam Walton opened the first WalmartWalmartWalmart is an American retailer founded by Sam Walton in 1962, with businesses spanning physical retail, membership warehouse clubs, e-commerce and related services. Its businesses include Walmart and Sam’s Club, and it has expanded into other markets through international investments; its shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WMT.Open the full entry store in Rogers in 1962; the company is headquartered in Bentonville.⁠[2]

Winthrop RockefellerWinthrop RockefellerWinthrop Rockefeller (1912–1973) was an American Republican politician, rancher and philanthropist who served as governor of Arkansas from 1967 to 1971, the state’s first Republican governor since the end of Reconstruction; before that, from 1955, he headed the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, promoting the state to outside investors.Open the full entry succeeded Orval Faubus, governor from 1954 to 1967, as the first Republican governor since Reconstruction and led reforms, especially in the prison system; later governors including Dale Bumpers, David Pryor and Bill Clinton continued modernization efforts.⁠[1][1][2]

A new constitution drafted by the seventh convention (1969–1970) was rejected by voters in 1970, and the eighth convention’s proposal (1979–1980) was narrowly rejected in 1980. The sixth convention’s proposal had already been defeated in 1918.⁠[6]

Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas in 1979–1981 and 1983–1992 and served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001.⁠[2]

The U.S. Census Bureau delivered the 2020 Census apportionment results to the President on April 26, 2021, when the resident population of the 50 states and the District of Columbia totaled 331,449,281. Arkansas was apportioned 4 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the same as after the 2010 Census, and has 6 electoral votes in the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections.⁠[13][14][15][16]

The state legislature, the General Assembly, has 100 representatives and 35 senators under Amendment 23; representatives are elected every two years and senators serve four-year terms. The regular session meets in January of odd-numbered years, and under Amendment 86 (2008) fiscal sessions meet in even-numbered years; 2026 is the fiscal session of the 95th General Assembly. Amendment 73 (1992) limited House members to three two-year terms and senators to two four-year terms, and Issue 3 (2014) set a combined maximum of sixteen years in both chambers. The governor is the chief executive, and the Supreme Court heads the judiciary. The state has 75 counties.⁠[17][18][2][1]

As of November 2026 the governor is Sarah Huckabee SandersSarah Huckabee SandersSarah Huckabee Sanders (born 1982) is an American Republican politician who was White House press secretary from 2017 to 2019. She has been governor of Arkansas since 2023, the state’s first woman in the office, and was re-elected in November 2026.Open the full entry, sworn in on January 10, 2023, as the 47th governor of Arkansas and the first woman to hold the office. She grew up in Pine Bluff and Texarkana, graduated from Little Rock Central High School and Ouachita Baptist University, and was White House Press Secretary from 2017 to 2019.⁠[19][20]

The Arkansas Supreme Court has seven justices, elected in statewide nonpartisan races to staggered eight-year terms.⁠[7]

Arkansas is bordered by MissouriMissouriMissouri is a state of the United States bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital is Jefferson City, its largest city is Kansas City, and its second-largest is St. Louis. It was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,154,913.Open the full entry to the north, OklahomaOklahomaOklahoma is a U.S. state whose capital is Oklahoma City. It was admitted to the Union on November 16, 1907, as the 46th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,959,353.Open the full entry to the west, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry to the southwest and Louisiana to the south, with the Mississippi River forming its eastern boundary; it ranks 29th among the 50 states in area. In Census Bureau 2010 measurements, the state has a total area of 53,179 square miles (137,732 km²), of which 52,035 square miles (134,771 km²) is land and 1,143 square miles (2,961 km²) is water.⁠[2][21]

The state has six natural divisions: the sparsely settled Ozark Plateau in the north, a center of pro-Union sentiment in the Civil War; the Ouachita Mountains, extending from near Little Rock into Oklahoma and known for novaculite, a rock unique to Arkansas; the Arkansas Valley between them, a prime settlement area; the West Gulf Coastal Plain covering most of the south, central to timber and to the oil industry of Union County; the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, or Arkansas Delta, covering the eastern third; and Crowley’s Ridge, about 150 miles long and 5 to 20 miles wide, once a refuge from floods.⁠[1]

The highest point is Mount Magazine at 2,753 feet (839 m), and the lowest, about 55 feet (17 m), is in the southeast where the Ouachita River crosses into Louisiana. All rivers flow south and east into the MississippiMississippiMississippi is a state of the United States on the Gulf of Mexico; Jackson is both its capital and its largest city. It was admitted to the Union on December 10, 1817, as the 20th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 2,961,279.Open the full entry system; the Arkansas River divides the state almost in half, with the White and St. Francis rivers to the north and the Red, Ouachita and Saline rivers to the south. Annual precipitation is nearly 50 inches (1,270 mm). About half the state is forested, and three national forests cover about 3 million acres.⁠[2]

In the 2020 Census, non-Hispanic whites made up 70.2 percent of the population, Black residents 15.1 percent, Hispanic or Latino residents 8.5 percent, Asian residents 1.7 percent and American Indian and Alaska Native residents 0.9 percent. The Hispanic share rose from about 3 percent in 2000 and 6 percent in 2010 to more than 8 percent in 2020.⁠[1][2]

Census Bureau estimates released on March 26, 2026, put the state’s population at about 3.11 million on July 1, 2025, up from about 3.09 million in 2024. Over the same period the Northwest Arkansas metro area (Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers) grew by 2.4 percent, from 607,433 to 622,177, the ninth-fastest growth among U.S. metro areas; the Little Rock metro area had 777,607 residents in 2025.⁠[22]

Census Bureau estimates for July 1, 2025, put Little Rock at 206,427 residents and Fayetteville at 106,623, followed by Fort Smith (90,855), Springdale (90,685) and Jonesboro (83,296). Cities such as Fayetteville, Rogers, Little Rock and Jonesboro have grown quickly, and northwest Arkansas grew rapidly with Walmart and Tyson Foods while the Delta fell into poverty.⁠[23][2][1]

Preliminary data released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis on March 28, 2025, put Arkansas’s 2024 current-dollar GDP at $188,723 million, with real GDP growth of 3.7%.⁠[24]

Arkansas is one of the largest rice producers in the United States, and since the 1960s soybeans have been its most widely cultivated crop; large-scale poultry farming began in northwest Arkansas in the 1920s. Tyson Foods, headquartered in Springdale, was the state’s most important manufacturer in the early 21st century. Bauxite mining has mostly ceased, natural gas and coal are extracted in the Arkansas River valley, hydroelectric stations stand along the White, Arkansas and Ouachita rivers, and there is a nuclear plant near Russellville. The Crater of Diamonds near Murfreesboro is the only active diamond mine in the country.⁠[2][1]

The Arkansas Economic Development Commission lists the state’s key industries as aerospace and defense, corporate services, firearms and ammunition, food and beverage, forest products, metals, technology and innovation, and transportation and logistics. The commission states that aerospace and defense is the state’s leading export by revenue, with more than 150 industrial facilities; seven of the world’s ten largest food and beverage companies have manufacturing facilities in Arkansas, which has 14.5 million acres of farmland; nearly 19 million acres, more than half of the state’s land area, are productive timberland, and Arkansas ranks fifth nationally in softwood lumber production; Mississippi County has become the largest steel-producing county in the nation; and more than 6,800 transportation, logistics and distribution companies operate in the state, including J.B. Hunt Transportation Services.⁠[25]

In the 1820s Dwight Mission taught Native American children; a common-school system was established in 1843, and the 1868 constitution laid the basis of the modern public education system. The University of Arkansas was founded in 1871, with its main campus in Fayetteville; Arkansas State University was founded in 1909 and the University of Central Arkansas in 1907.⁠[2]

Major cultural institutions include the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock and the Ozark Folk Center State Park in Mountain View. The Arkansas Travelers of Little Rock have played minor league baseball since 1903, and the Razorbacks went undefeated in 1964 and won the national championship.⁠[2]

The name is linked to the Quapaw people and the Arkansas River and probably comes from akansea, the IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry word for the Quapaw. The nickname “The Natural State,” coined by the tourism industry in the 1980s, was adopted officially in 1995; earlier nicknames included the “Bear State,” “Bowie State” and “Toothpick State,” the “Wonder State” from 1923 and, about 30 years later, the “Land of Opportunity.” The state motto is “Regnat Populus” (“The People Rule”).⁠[2][1]

The state bird is the mockingbird, the flower the apple blossom, the tree the pine, the rock bauxite, the gem the diamond, the musical instrument the fiddle, the folk dance the square dance, the grain rice and the nut the pecan.⁠[1]

Arkansas.gov: Official website: https://portal.arkansas.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[26]

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Official website: https://governor.arkansas.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19][26]

Arkansas State Legislature: Official website: https://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/ (opens in a new window).⁠[18][26]

Arkansas Judiciary: Official website: https://arcourts.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]