Mob Rule in the Ozarks with Kenneth C. Barnes - Legacies & Lunch January 2025

Name: Mob Rule in the Ozarks with Kenneth C. Barnes - Legacies & Lunch January 2025
Start: 2025-01-08T12:00:00-06:00
Location: UA Little Rock Downtown

Schedule

Wed, 08 Jan, 2025 at 12:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

UA Little Rock Downtown | Little Rock, AR

This event is hybrid - advanced registration required for virtual participation, registration link: https://events.cals.org/event/12556780
On January 15, 1923, an angry crowd assembled in Harrison, Arkansas, near the headquarters of the Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad, intent on quashing the strike of railroad employees that had dragged on for nearly two years. Supported by local officials, the mob terrorized strikers and sympathizers in Harrison and other towns along the M&NA line in the Ozark Mountains. This violence effectively ended one of the longest rail strikes in American history—the only one, in fact, ended by a mob uprising. In his new book Mob Rule in the Ozarks (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), historian Kenneth C. Barnes documents how the strike reflected some of the major economic concerns that preoccupied the United States in the wake of World War I and created a long-lasting rupture within Ozarks communities.
Kenneth C. Barnes is distinguished professor emeritus of history at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. He is the author of Who Killed John Clayton?: Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South, 1861–1893 and Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960. For his book The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Barnes garnered his third J. G. Ragsdale Book Award in Arkansas History.