Rand Dotson, Senior Acquisitions Editor
Long before I became the acquiring editor for southern history at LSU Press, I was an aspiring historian in graduate school at LSU. Having been deeply fascinated with the history of the South, I was fully aware of the Press’s longstanding reputation as one of the leading academic publishers in the region. What impressed me most about the Press was not only the ways in which its array of award-winning and distinguished titles had literally shaped the prevailing historiography of the southern past, but also how many of its titles had over the decades added new and important voices to the debate. The Press’s books about or by black southerners were a substantial part of that admirable tradition. Dozens of the Press’s releases are cherished classics in African American history. Indeed, titles such as Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave; John Blassingame’s Slave Testimony; Eric Foner’s Nothing but Freedom; and Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana literally reshaped the way historians thought about black southerners.
