Competing Memories

Whether it's engaging the public with his day job as community outreach director for the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program, expertly editing essay collections, or publishing his own original research, Mark Christ is a leading advocate of Civil War Arkansas history. His next project, Competing Memories: The Legacy of Arkansas's Civil War (September 2016), "collects the proceedings of the final seminar sponsored by the Arkansas Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission, which sought to define the lasting impact that the nation’s deadliest conflict had on the state by bringing together some of the state’s leading historians."

"In these essays, Thomas A. DeBlack explores the post-war lives of both Union and Confederate soldiers who played prominent roles in Civil War Arkansas. Cherisse Jones-Branch delves into the lives of black Arkansans during the war and Reconstruction. Jeannie Whayne discusses the many ways the Civil War affected the state’s economic development, while Kelly Houston Jones investigates the Civil War’s impact on Arkansas women. Mary Jane Warde examines the devastating effects of the Civil War on Native Americans in Arkansas and the Indian Territory. Elliott West scrutinizes Civil War Arkansas from a continental perspective, and Carl Moneyhon considers the evolution of how we remember the Civil War."

For CWBA reviews of some of Christ's earlier work, see also:
• “The Earth Reeled and Trees Trembled”: Civil War Arkansas, 1863-1864 (2007).
• Civil War Arkansas 1863: The Battle for a State (2010).
• The Die Is Cast: Arkansas Goes to War, 1861 (2010).
• "This Day We Marched Again": A Union Soldier's Account of War in Arkansas and the Trans-Mississippi (2014).
• I Do Wish This Cruel War Was Over: First-Person Accounts of Civil War Arkansas from the Arkansas Historical Quarterly (2014).