Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912–1956 by John Kirk, has won the 2024 J. G. Ragsdale Book Award from the Arkansas Historical Association.
Why did Winthrop Rockefeller, scion of one of the most powerful families in American history, leave New York for an Arkansas mountaintop in the 1950s? In this richly detailed biography of the former Arkansas governor, John A. Kirk delves into the historical record to fully unravel that mystery for the first time. Kirk pursues clues threaded throughout Rockefeller’s life, tracing his family background, childhood, and education; his rise in the oil industry from roustabout to junior executive; his military service in the Pacific during World War II, including his involvement in the battles of Guam, Leyte, and Okinawa; his postwar work in race relations, health, education, and philanthropy; his marriage to and divorce from Barbara “Bobo” Sears; and the birth of his only child, future Arkansas lieutenant governor Win Paul Rockefeller. This careful examination of Winthrop Rockefeller’s first forty-four years casts a powerful new light on his relationship with his adopted state, where his legacy continues to be felt more than half a century after his governorship.
Reviewing the book in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, David Stebenne wrote “Kirk has produced a … sympathetic, deeply researched, and balanced account of Winthrop Rockefeller’s early life. … Kirk’s book does much to demolish the conventional view of Winthrop Rockefeller as a nonentity whose unhappy marriage and stormy divorce prompted him to leave New York and become a cattle rancher in Arkansas. What emerges instead is a portrait of an upper-class person who was something of a misfit in the world from which he came and found another one where he fit better as a result of the larger changes in American life associated with the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.”
John A. Kirk is the George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the author or editor of ten books, including Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis and Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives.
Since 2002, the Arkansas Historical Association has annually presented the J. G. Ragsdale Book Award in Arkansas History for the best book-length historical study (nonfiction) of any aspect of Arkansas history. This award is given in honor of J. G. Ragsdale, a 1919 graduate of the University of Arkansas. Ragsdale was a founding member of the Arkansas Historical Association and chaired the board of trustees at the University of Arkansas. The award waspresented at the annual conference of the Arkansas Historical Association at Heber Springs.
The winner of the 2023 Ragsdale Award was Country Boy: The Roots of Johnny Cash by Colin Woodward. Other winners of the Ragsdale Award from the University of Arkansas Press are The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas by Kenneth Barnes, Arkansas Travelers by Andrew Milson, Dardanelle and the Bottoms by Diane Gleason, Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas by Kenneth Barnes, Arkansas/Arkansaw by Brooks Blevins, Ruled by Race by Grif Stockley, A Stranger and a Sojourner by Billy Higgins, Promises Kept by Sidney McMath, and The Rumble of a Distant Drum by Morris Arnold.