Bill and Hillary Clinton National (Adams Field)

The visitor center of Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site sits at the intersection of West Daisy L. Gatson Bates Drive and Park Street, directly across from the school. The school itself, completed in 1927, is still a functioning public high school — the only operating high school in the United States that is also a unit of the National Park System. About 2,500 students attend classes here every day. The NPS visitor center opened on September 24, 2007 — fifty years to the day after Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10730 and the 101st Airborne arrived. President Clinton, who as a young Arkansan had grown up in the years after the crisis, hosted the dedication gala. Civil rights activist and Georgia congressman John Lewis gave the keynote. The exhibit traces the legal history that led to Brown v. Board, the Little Rock Crisis itself, and the experiences of the Little Rock Nine after they entered Central — verbal abuse and physical attacks every day, lockers broken into, homework destroyed, one student nearly attacked with acid. Listening stations carry oral history interviews with the Nine themselves. The original 1957 Mobil gas station across Park Street, where journalists set up their typewriters during the crisis, has been restored and is part of the site. The school received National Historic Landmark designation in 1982 and became a National Historic Site under the NPS in 1998. In July 2024 the Interior Department began the process to nominate Central High for UNESCO World Heritage status.

Stuttgart sits at the center of the Grand Prairie of Arkansas — a perfectly flat, naturally treeless plain that became the most productive rice-growing region in the United States after the first commercial rice crop was planted here in 1904. Today Arkansas produces roughly half of all U.S. rice; Stuttgart is the largest rice-handling town in the country. The same flooded fields that produce the rice also lie directly under the Mississippi Flyway — the migration corridor for an estimated 40% of all North American waterfowl. The result: Stuttgart hosts the World's Championship Duck Calling Contest every Thanksgiving weekend (since 1936), a four-day festival that brings 50,000+ visitors and judges the country's best duck callers on a four-call sequence (hail, feed, mating, comeback). Riceland Foods is headquartered here. The Museum of the Arkansas Grand Prairie tells both the agricultural and the waterfowl stories. November–January is duck season; outside hunting season Stuttgart's flat-as-a-table terrain is itself the landscape attraction.

America's oldest federally protected land — set aside as the Hot Springs Reservation in 1832, four decades before Yellowstone became the first national park in 1872. Promoted to national park status in 1921; at 5,500 acres it's the second-smallest in the system (only Gateway Arch is smaller). The park is unusual in being embedded inside the city of Hot Springs — Bathhouse Row is the urban core, eight preserved bathhouses on Central Avenue built between 1892 and 1923 (Buckstaff, Fordyce, Hale, Lamar, Maurice, Ozark, Quapaw, and Superior), all originally drawing on 47 natural hot springs that emerge from the lower slopes of Hot Springs Mountain at 143°F. The water that comes out today fell as rain about 4,400 years ago and traveled roughly 6,000 feet down through fractured Ouachita sandstone before reaching the surface. From the 1880s onward, Hot Springs was the birthplace of Major League Baseball spring training — Babe Ruth, Cy Young, and later Jackie Robinson trained at the bathhouse gyms. Prohibition-era illegal gambling brought Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. Today: two operating bathhouses (Buckstaff and Quapaw), the Superior is the only craft brewery inside any U.S. national park, and KHOT Memorial Field sits four miles south.

Indianola, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, is where Riley B. King — born across the line in Itta Bena on September 16, 1925 — worked picking cotton and driving a tractor before he became B.B. King. The museum opened September 13, 2008 in a restored brick cotton gin where King worked in the 1940s. Inside: 15 GRAMMY awards, his Gibson ES-355 "Lucille" guitars, his tour bus, a recreation of his office, and exhibits placing his life inside the Delta's segregation-era cotton economy and the Civil Rights Movement. King chose to be buried on the museum grounds — his grave is on site. Indianola sits on US-82 between Greenwood and Greenville, half an hour west of where Highway 61 meets Highway 49 at Clarksdale (the "Crossroads" of Robert Johnson legend). The whole region is the foundation of American popular music.