treasures

Today I went to the state historical commission of the state of Arkansas. Their online catalog is called CARAT - which stands for the catalog of Arkansas Resources and Archival Treasures. I thought the name was cute and catchy and was a nice play on the fact that Arkansas has the largest open pit and publicly accessible diamond mine in the country. I was excited to find out that they really do have treasures -- at least when it came to my dissertation research. They had much more material than I'd expected and had all sorts of items that I'd never seen cataloged before. That was the upside. The downside was that the materials were too fragile for copying so I sat typing out pages and pages of documents today and will be going back tomorrow for more. So much typing means no exciting photos - maybe we'll be back to images tomorrow. :)