The newly named Dee Brown Memorial Garden on the University of Central Arkansas campus will be officially dedicated at 3 p.m. Monday, April 13. The garden is located south of Bear Hall and directly behind Arkansas Hall.
Attendance is free and open to the public.
Honored as a 1988 Distinguished Alumnus, Dorris Alexander “Dee” Brown grew up in Little Rock and attended Arkansas State Teachers College (now UCA), graduating in 1931. In Conway, he began a long career as a university librarian and author of more than 30 works, most significantly Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published to great acclaim in 1970.
Subsequently translated into numerous languages, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is the only book by an Arkansan named on the New York Public Library’s list of the most important 100 books to be published in the 20th century. This and many of Brown’s other books prompted reconsideration among historians of the nineteenth-century “Indian wars” and of the period of westward expansion—work that is still underway today.
Brown’s first book was published in 1942, 11 years after he finished his bachelor’s degree. He wrote 26 books in all, and edited two books. After graduation, Brown headed for Washington, D.C., where, while working to pay for his part-time studies, he earned a degree in library science from George Washington University in 1937. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois in 1952.
His career as a librarian began in 1934 as an assistant in the U.S. Department of Agriculture library in Washington, D.C., where he remained until 1942. After a tour in the Army from 1942 to 1945, he became a technical librarian in the U.S. War Department for three years, and then librarian of agriculture with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1948 until his retirement in 1972. He was also a professor at the University of Illinois from 1962 to 1972.
Brown passed away in 2002.
More information about this fascinating Arkansas historian can be found here: http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=1086
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