Brooks Blevins has a new book entitled Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, & Good Ol' Boys Defined a State (UA Press, $29.95).

It's about the idea of Arkansas or Arkansas' negative image. Blevins, a native of Izard County, teaches at Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo.

Arkansas has long been portrayed as a land of illiteracy, bare feet, slow trains, and double-wides. These images are in part true, but greatly exaggerated. Politicians have used them to garner votes, entertainers have made money with them, and most Arkansans have reacted to them defensively.

The title itself plays up the state's dual nature: Arkansawyer vs. Arkansan. This duality goes all the way back to the Arkansas Traveler and to pioneers like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who wrote in 1818, "In manners, morals, customs, dress, contempt of labour and hospitality, the state of society is not essentially different from that which exists among the savages."

Somehow the state never turned its reputation into an asset like Tennessee has done.

In the ADG this morning, Blevins says he expects he will be accused of insulting the state. If so, I doubt that it will amount to much. 

I also strongly recommend another Blevins' work: Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (2001).