UA Little Rock Announces Evenings with History 2024-25 Speakers

Sponsored by the University History Institute, the Department of History at UA Little Rock will host the annual Evenings with History lecture series featuring UA Little Rock faculty members and guest speakers who give presentations about historical topics.

The six sessions for the 2024-2025 series are scheduled on the first Tuesday of each month for October, December, February, March, and April, and the second Tuesday of November.

Light refreshments are served at 7 p.m., and the lectures begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Ottenheimer Auditorium at the Historic Arkansas Museum (200 E. Third St.) in Little Rock.

The events are free and open to the public; however, those interested can support the Evenings with History series by purchasing a subscription online.

Oct. 1: Dr. Roy Ritchie, "Medieval America": To kick off the 2024-25 Evenings with History lecture series, special guest speaker Dr. Roy Ritchie, the W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research Emeritus at Huntington Library in San Marino, California, will explore the flourishing cultures in America prior to European colonization.

Ritchie's research focuses on early American history, and more recently, he has published works related to the sea: "Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates" and "The Lure of the Beach: A Global History."

Nov. 12: Dr. Johanna Miller Lewis, "The Federal Government Must Prevail: Eisenhower, the 101st Airborne, and the 1957 Central High Crisis": Recently retired Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Education, Dr. Johanna Miller Lewis will lecture on Central High School in 1957, when the Arkansas National Guard was called in to prevent nine African American teenagers from entering the high school.

Miller Lewis retired in June 2024, after serving 33 years at UA Little Rock, and she held a number of roles in the Department of History, the Graduate School, and the College of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences, and Education's Office of the Dean. Her decades worth of research on the Central High Crisis can be seen today at the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site Visitor Center.

Dec. 3: Dr. Hannah Anderson, "Plant Talk in Early America: Exchanges of Botanical Knowledge among Settlers and Indigenous People in the Seventeenth-Century Northeast": Assistant Professor Hannah Anderson concludes the 2024 lectures with a discussion surrounding the sharing of botanical knowledge that occurred in the seventeenth century and its impact today. With migration and colonialism, changing ecologies affected how plants were conceptualized during this time.

Based on this research, Anderson is preparing a book manuscript titled, "Lived Botany: Settlers and Natural History in the Early British Atlantic." Anderson was recently a Dibner Long-Term Research Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library in California.

The three lectures that will be given in the spring of 2025 have also been announced:

• February 4, 2025: Dr. Katrina Yeaw, "Finding Girls in the Archives: The Case of Fekiriyeh and Renghi Sefa"
• March 4, 2025: Drs. Charles Romney, Kris McAbee, and Larry Smith, "Playing with History: Community and the Contemporary Stage"
• April 1, 2025: Dr. Kyungsun Lee, "The Arkansas RIver: Navigating the Impact of Climate Change"

More details regarding the Evenings with History series, as well as detailed descriptions of the lectures, can be found on the Department of History's website. For additional information, contact Dr. Michael Heil at [email protected].

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