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Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State. By Brooks Blevins. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2009. Pp. x, 242. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-905-6.)
As a native Arkansan - albeit one who moved to North Carolina at the age of three - I have often been mystified by people who wonder if I regularly wear shoes when they discover the state of my nativity. Indeed, stereotypes about the backwardness, violence, ignorance, laziness, and overall white trashiness of residents of the Natural State have abounded for as long as the state has existed. In Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good OV Boys Defined a State, Brooks Blevins explores the history, the staying power, and the complexity of these stereotypes in a meticulously researched, thoughtprovoking, and highly entertaining manner.
Blevins's account follows a roughly chronological narrative of the image of Arkansans in literature and popular culture from the early nineteenth century, when much of the area was under Spanish control, up to the present day. The story begins with the accounts of early elite travelers like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Henry...