Abbreviated as AR by ABBREVIATIONFINDER, Arkansas is a state of the center-southeast (South region) of the United States of America, with capital in the city of Little Rock. It borders the Mississippi River, and the states of Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi. The name of the state derives from the word kansas (the term used by the Algonquin Indians for the Quapaw Indians), as it was pronounced by the French in the seventeenth century.
History
The first signs of human population in Arkansas date from 10,000 years before our era, with the remains found on the Ozark Plateau and on the banks of the White River; Vestiges of groups related to the Toltecs have also been located southeast of the city of Little Rock. The lands of present-day Arkansas have been inhabited by the Quapaw, Caddo, Osage, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes. The Cherokee who resided in Arkansas were originally from Mississippi, from where they were expelled by federal authorities and assigned to reservations in this territory at the beginning of the 19th century.
The Spanish were the first Europeans to explore the Arkansas lands, when Hernando de Soto arrived in 1541. As early as the seventeenth century, French explorations began in the region of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers. The Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and the fur merchant Louis Jolliet contributed, in 1673, to making Europeans aware of both the geography of this state and the hostility of the Indians who inhabited it. In 1680, La Salle explored part of the territory when he sailed down the Mississippi River on his way to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. These expeditions culminated in the French claim to the Louisiana Territory in 1682., which included the current state of Arkansas. From then on the French settlements began, when the settlement of the southern part of the Mississippi Valley began, along the Arkansas and White rivers.
For thirty-seven years Arkansas was under Spanish rule since in 1763, after the Seven Years’ War, France ceded Louisiana (and therefore this territory) to Spain. In 1800 France took back Louisiana to sell it three years later to the United States. In 1806, the Arkansas District was created as part of the Louisiana Territory. The Congress of the United States, which exercised the power of government over the dependent territories, later decided to reorganize the administration of these territories, after which Arkansas became part of the Territory of Missouri. In 1819, Arkansas finally acquired Territory status, the first step in initiating negotiations for admission as a sovereign state to the Union. The process of acquiring Arkansas state status, however, depended on the admission of another state as the Missouri Compromise stated that new stars would only be added to the flag if the balance between slave states and states was prevented from being broken. free. Following the admissions of Maine (free) in 1820 and Missouri (slave) in 1821, no new states were admitted to the Union until June 15, 1836, when Arkansas was admitted as a slave state, followed by Michigan in 1837 as a free state..
Civil war
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Arkansas joined the Union, a contradiction that was later corrected when Lincoln tried to get Arkansas to recruit troops and his representatives decided to support the Confederacy. After this change of allegiance, several battles for control of the Mississippi valley, the most important in the northwest of the state, took place in the territory, at Pea Ridge. In 1863, the Unionists took Little Rock; from then until 1865, Arkansas remained physically and humanely divided between Confederates and Unionists until the end of the war, in 1865.
Economy
The state’s economy grew during the final decades of the 19th century, thanks to the railroad and the discovery of bauxite deposits. Later, already in the 20s of the 20th century, the discovery of oil managed to complement its agrarian economy, based mainly on the cultivation of rice and soybeans. The economic crisis of the 1930s and the continuous droughts had a devastating effect on the state, which nevertheless managed to recover thanks to the fact that the Second World War created a great demand for its primary products, both mining and livestock.
- CountryAAH: Offers a full list of cities and towns in Arkansas, together with postal codes for each of them, and including capital city of Arkansas.
With the end of the world war, the process of racial disaggregation began, which was especially conflictive in some southern states: in Arkansas there was one of the most momentous moments in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, when the Forces President Eisenhower had to send troops to prevent Arkansas Governor Orval E. Faubus from using the National Guard to prevent black students from entering legally desegregated schools, as the Supreme Court had stipulated in 1958.
The Arkansas economy grew after World War II thanks to the work of financier and later politician, Winthrop Rockefeller, who attracted numerous industries before and after he was elected governor in 1966. However, the biggest milestone from an economic point of view in recent decades was the launch in 1970 of the Arkansas River Development Program, which has managed to make navigation from this river to the Mississippi possible.
