Rachel Whitaker is a historian, doctoral candidate in American History at the University of Arkansas, and research specialist at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History. She holds a Master of Arts in American Studies and a Master of Science in Library Media, both from Northeastern State University. Her Arkansas roots stretch back at least eight generations through families who settled in the region alongside the Cherokee during Indian Removal.
Historian Rachel Whitaker reveals the KKK's deep integration with 1920s Northwest Arkansas church culture, traces the line from frontier social enforcement to organized violence, and lifts up stories of congregations that chose welcome over exclusion, including one tied to the Little Rock Nine.
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Historian Rachel Whitaker traces faith's arrival in NWA from the 1820s through the Civil War revealing how early churches functioned as institutions of social control, how denominations fractured over slavery, and how enslaved people built congregations as acts of resistance.
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Historian Rachel Whitaker, Shiloh Museum of Ozark History, explores the early formation of Washington and Benton Counties, white settler power, slavery, and Black history in Northwest Arkansas.
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