190 years ago this week, work started on the Arkansas Constitution. Last night at Mullins Library on the University of Arkansas campus, a new exhibit opened celebrating the process of creating that constitution. The framers 190 years ago would continue creating the document until the end of the Constitutional Convention three and a half months later. Nineteen decades and 104 amendments later, it's still the state's constitution.
"When they were working on it in the 20th century, trying three different times to upset it and try to modernize it, really, that was their whole goal, was to make it simpler so it would make it easier government for everyone."
Brock Manasseri is one of three University of Arkansas history students who curated this new exhibit, Regnat Populus: Digitizing 190 Years of Arkansas Constitutional History.
"They didn't quite explain that to the people well enough to get it to pass. But yeah, 104 amendments later, and we still have this document."
The exhibit is in the Special Collections Gallery in Mullins Library on the University of Arkansas campus. The digitizing of Arkansas's Constitution, and the efforts both successful and not to change, adapt or renew the document, all part of the Quill Project, a digital humanities effort giving access to legislative processes. Ashlyn Fox, another curator of the exhibit, says the Quill Project began at Pembroke College at University of Oxford, inspired by Dr. Nicholas Cole's curiosity about how the United States Constitution was negotiated and drafted.
"And then he expanded that to work in other countries, other states, constitutions. The purpose of it is to see exactly how many hands and how many iterations of the document had to go through to get to the final version, and give credit to those whose opinions might have not made it, figure out how those opinions were still warped into the reason why we have certain provisions or decisions in a document. So that's, of course, what we're doing here with the 1874 Arkansas document, which had many, many opinions. There was more than 90 delegates across the state, of course, from every county, and each of them had their own thing that they wanted in the Constitution, what their county wanted."
At last night's opening reception for the exhibit, Ashlyn Fox explained to visitors how the University of Arkansas partnered with other institutions to create this project.
"Last year, the Arkansas State Archives, the University of Arkansas and the Arkansas Attorney General's Office partnered with the University of Oxford to explore and democratize Arkansas constitutional history. And then, in February of this year, the 1874 model was published, and we continue work as well to work on the 1868 model, the 1864 model, and also amendments to the 1874 Constitution."
Last night's opening coincided to the day with the 190th anniversary of the launch of the 1874 Constitutional Convention at the state House in Little Rock, and the exhibit will close on October 31 this year, the exact 190th anniversary of the close of the Constitutional Convention. The exhibit follows the process from pre-Constitution history in Arkansas to the bloody Brooks-Baxter War between factions supporting different men for the governor of Arkansas. It was a two-month ordeal that left 200 Arkansas residents dead and helped lead to the Constitutional Convention.
The exhibit, like all of the exhibits in the Special Collections Gallery, is free and open to the public, no advance registration required. And we're going to hear much more about the exhibit and the work required to bring it to the gallery on Monday's edition of Ozarks at Large.
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