Pages from the Past: 2017

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is printing one page a day from each of the 200 years since the first issue of the Arkansas Gazette was printed Nov. 20, 1819. We chose these pages for reasons that range from historic significance to how legible we can make the antique ink. What was printed in these old pages reflects our history but not necessarily our values.

This Page 1 of the June 29, 2017, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a typical front page of the statewide daily newspaper in the second decade of the 21st century. Here is the In the News column, a regular feature since its first appearance in the Arkansas Gazette on Sept. 1, 1935. Here are photographs, routine since the first reproductions appeared in the Gazette in September 1904. Page 1 appeared in color, as it has since the 1980s. But in this digital era, this page was — and still is — available to subscribers in several online formats, from plain text to PDFs. “Browse” to it in the online archive, and readers will find a version with internal navigation links such that a touch on a “continued on” jumpline at the end of a story immediately opens that next page.

And like thousands of front pages before it, this one holds news reports of more than passing interest to Arkansans: health care legislation, immigration, panhandling, expansion of the Interstate 30 corridor through Little Rock and North Little Rock, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, violence, mental illness.

A 6-foot-tall monument to the biblical Ten Commandments lay in ruins the day after it was erected on the grounds of the state Capitol. Thirty-two-year-old Michael Tate Reed of Van Buren rammed a 2016 Dodge Dart into the stone while yelling “freedom” and streaming live on Facebook. Charged with felony criminal mischief, which carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence, he was evaluated at the state hospital before the Pulaski County Circuit Court ruled him innocent by reason of mental disease and ordered him confined to the hospital for at least five years.

Groups opposed to the monument condemned its violent destruction. The monument’s sponsor, state Sen. Jason Rapert, R-Conway, vowed to replace it. Paid for by donations to the American History and Heritage Foundation created by Rapert, an identical monument was installed April 26, 2018, and surrounded by concrete bollards. In August that year, an out-of-state group, the Satanic Temple, and an unaffiliated organization, Satanic Arkansas, protested at the

Capitol using a portable statue of Baphomet, a part-man, part-goat deity they said should be honored with a monument too.

Litigation is ongoing in a lawsuit that combines separate complaints by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas and a coalition of people representing various religions and secular groups who object to the monument as a state-sponsored endorsement of one religion.

Readers who have missed any of the updates about the case or the editorials, humor columns or national news stories related to Baphomet can find them in the newspaper’s digital archives at arkansasonline.com/ archive-search. History at your fingertips.