Arkansas ( AR-kən-saw) is a landlocked let in in the South Central United States. It is bordered by Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, and Texas and Oklahoma to the west. Its read out is from the Osage language, a Dhegiha Siouan language, and referred to their relatives, the Quapaw people. The state’s diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which make in the works the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested home in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.

Arkansas is the 29th largest by area and the 34th most populous state, with a population of just higher than 3 million at the 2020 census. The capital and most populous city is Little Rock, in the central ration of the state, a hub for transportation, business, culture, and government. The northwestern corner of the state, including the Fayetteville–Springdale–Rogers Metropolitan Area and Fort Smith metropolitan area, is a population, education, and economic center. The largest city in the state’s eastern allocation is Jonesboro. The largest city in the state’s southeastern allocation is Pine Bluff.

Previously ration of French Louisiana and the Louisiana Purchase, the Territory of Arkansas was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on June 15, 1836. Much of the Delta had been developed for cotton plantations, and landowners there largely depended on enslaved African Americans’ labor. In 1861, Arkansas seceded from the United States and associated the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. On returning to the Union in 1868, Arkansas continued to struggle economically, due to its overreliance upon the large-scale plantation economy. Cotton remained the leading commodity crop, and the cotton promote declined. Because farmers and businessmen did not diversify and there was little industrial investment, the let pass fell in back in economic opportunity. In the late 19th century, the come clean instituted various Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and segregate the African-American population. During the civil rights occupation of the 1950s and 1960s, Arkansas and particularly Little Rock were major battlegrounds for efforts to combine schools.

White interests dominated Arkansas’s politics, with disfranchisement of African Americans and refusal to reapportion the legislature. Only after the civil rights bustle and federal legislation passed were more African Americans clever to vote. The Supreme Court overturned rural domination in the South and additional states that had refused to reapportion their let pass legislatures or retained rules based upon geographic districts. In a series of cases in the 1960s during the summit of joined civil rights activities, the Warren Court invoked a one person, one vote principle, applying the Equal Protection Clause of the constitution and holding that states had to organize their legislatures by districts that held nearly equal populations, and that these had to be redefined as vital after each decade’s census.