Archive for the ‘Arkansaw/Arkansas’ Category

Arkansas/Arkansaw: Brooks Blevins Interview (Bonus) by Old State House Museum

This spring, the Old State House Museum opened a new exhibit entitled Arkansas/Arkansaw: A State and Its Reputation. The exhibit sheds new light on the evolution of Arkansas’s backwoods, hillbilly image.  Curated by and based on a book by Brooks Blevins of Missouri State University,  Arkansas/Arkansaw will remain open to the public (for FREE!) until March 2012.

As part of the museum’s efforts to promote the new exhibit, I interviewed Dr. Blevins over the phone to produce a video podcast. (If you haven’t watched the podcast, I highly encourage it!)  We spoke for about an hour, but only 20 minutes of the audio made the cut to the podcast.  As a bonus, below is a 3-minute snippet from the interview in which Dr. Blevins discusses the irony behind the exhibit and some of the more nuanced aspects of Arkansas/Arkansaw.

 
   This episode of the Old State House Museum Collection podcast deals with our most current exhibit, Arkansas / Arkansaw : A State and Its Reputation. We feature an interview with the curator of the exhibit, Dr. Brooks Blevins, a professor of Ozark Studies at Missouri State University. Through his research and book commissioned by the Old State House, Dr. Blevins explores the origins of the states image as a backwards hillbilly state. The podcast is embedded below in three parts (YouTube only allows 10 minutes per clip).

You can download this episode by clicking here, or subscribe to our podcast thru iTunes by clicking here.

Recently I had the pleasure of conducting a telephone interview with Dr. Brooks Blevins regarding the recent exhibit at the Old State House and his book “Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State.” We spoke for about an hour and the resulting audio will be used in a forthcoming podcast. As a teaser for those who have not yet purchased the book or seen the exhibit, here is the Google Books preview embedded below…

I encourage you to come back to the blog and check out the video podcast after it’s been posted this next week. And even further, come out to the museum and see the exhibit!