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Arkansas Biography: A Collection of Notable Lives. Edited by Nancy A. Williams. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000. Pp. x, 334. Acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, general index, index of contributors. $50.00, cloth; $30.00, paper.)
Arkansas Biography consists of biographical essays by 175 scholars on some 300 figures in Arkansas history. This volume is in some ways similar to the American National Biography [ANB] (1999), a twentyfour-volume set of which I served as co-general editor with John A. Garraty. Before considering the merits of Arkansas Biography, one can fairly ask, in light of an existing "national biography" of over 17,000 Americans, including hundreds of Arkansans, whether Arkansas Biography serves a useful purpose.
Nancy A. Williams, the editor, justifies the volume on the grounds that while national biographies choose subjects whose significance transcends a particular region or locality, the subjects in Arkansas Biography were explicitly selected because they had done something "worthy of note" in Arkansas (p. 1).
To determine whether Arkansas Biography merely duplicated, in small part, the content of the ANB, I compared a random sample of subjects in Arkansas Biography-those whose last names appeared immediately ofter "ARK" in the alphabet (for Arkansas)-to the ANB. (I skipped Harry Ashmore, who died in 1998 and was thus ineligible for the ANB, which only included figures who died...