Pryor Center Presents: 'Place Names: Heritage, Hope and Happenstance,' With Dan Boice on Feb. 5

Editor's Note: This article accidentally ran in the Monday News Brief on Feb. 9, but the event had already passed.

The Pryor Center Presents lecture series continues Thursday, Feb. 5, at 6 p.m. with "Place Names: Heritage, Hope and Happenstance,' presented by Dan Boice, University of Arkansas at Monticello library director. The event is hosted by the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Who hasn't wondered about the origin of Arkansas place names like Smackover or Possum Grape? Drop in and satisfy your curiosity as Dan Boice, author of Naming Arkansas: Curious Place Names from Greasy Corner to Sock City, introduces his book and shares the history behind the names of Arkansas towns. Copies of Naming Arkansas will be available for purchase and signing.

Boice is a native of West Michigan, where his path to the major leagues was blocked when pitchers began throwing him curve balls. He attended Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and received master's degrees in history and library science from the University of Michigan. Boice worked at academic libraries in Illinois, South Carolina and Iowa before becoming the library director at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, where he continues to serve, in 2015.

Boice has had a lifelong dilettante's love for other languages, and especially for the etymological riches of English and its regional variants. In 2024 The History Press published his book, Naming Arkansas: Curious Place Names from Greasy Corner to Sock City. Little Rock Public Radio airs his notes on place names called "Naming Arkansas" on KUAR.

The Pryor Center is located at 1 E. Center St., Suite 120. The event is free and open to the public, and parking is available in the Town Center parking deck on East Avenue.

About the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History: The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History is an oral history program with the mission to document the history of Arkansas through the collection of spoken memories and visual records, preserve the collection in perpetuity, and connect Arkansans and the world to the collection through the Internet, TV broadcasts, educational programs, and other means. The Pryor Center records audio and video interviews about Arkansas history and culture, collects other organizations' recordings, organizes these recordings into an archive, and provides public access to the archive, primarily through the website at pryorcenter.uark.edu. The Pryor Center is the state's only oral and visual history program with a statewide, seventy-five county mission to collect, preserve, and share audio and moving image recordings of Arkansas history.

About the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences: The Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences is the largest and most academically diverse unit on campus with three schools, 16 departments and 43 academic programs and research centers. The college provides the majority of the core curriculum for all University of Arkansas students.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $2.2 billion to Arkansas' economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research News.