CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas Presents MONDAY MALADIES

Speaker: Thomas DeBlack, professor of history (ret.) at Arkansas Tech University

Thomas DeBlack recently retired after twenty-three years as a professor of history at Arkansas Tech University. He is a 1969 graduate of Nashville (Arkansas) High School and holds a BA from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas (1973), an MSE from Ouachita Baptist University (1979), and a PhD from the University of Arkansas (1995). DeBlack taught in the public schools in Arkansas for twelve years. He is a past president of the Arkansas Historical Association and the Arkansas Association of College History Teachers. DeBlack is co-author of Arkansas: A Narrative History (2nd edition, 2013) and author of With Fire and Sword: Arkansas 1861–1874 (2003). In 2016, he published a history of the first hundred years of Arkansas Tech titled A Century Forward: The Centennial History of Arkansas Tech University. He is currently working on a book on Lakeport Plantation in Chicot County and another on the Brooks-Baxter War. He lives in Conway with his wife, Susan, and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Susannah.

About the Program Series

With the COVID-19 pandemic having caused more than 100,000 deaths in the United States alone by the beginning of June 2020, many policy makers and others have looked to the past to understand how pandemics affect societies, allowing them to create strategies that can ease the death toll and to consider what long-lasting changes might result from our present situation.

The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas is hosting a series of lectures on the history of medicine, disease, and containment in the Natural State. The series, starting June 8 and running every other Monday evening through August, will offer some historical perspective to what is going on today in Arkansas and around the world.

Each lecture will be a Zoom webinar and will be streamed to YouTube Live, and then archived on YouTube for later viewing. Attendees must register to participate in Zoom webinar and ask questions of the speaker.