Rand Dotson

Senior Editor, U.S. History and Southern Studies

(225) 578-6412 pdotso1@lsu.edu

Rand Dotson received a B.A. in History from Roanoke College (Salem, Va.), an M.A. in American History from Virginia Tech, and a Ph.D. in American History from Louisiana State University. He is a history instructor at LSU and the author of Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912: Magic City of the New South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007). Dotson joined the LSU Press staff in 2004. He acquires books in history, southern studies, and music. In history, he seeks academic books about America, the South, and Louisiana. Dotson is especially interested in acquiring history books that offer innovative or challenging interpretations of southern history, including those covering the colonial and antebellum eras, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the New South, civil rights, and legal history. In southern studies, he is mainly interested in books that focus on southern culture, entertainment, recreation, food ways, folkways, and art. In music, he is particularly interested in books on “roots music” indigenous to Louisiana and the South, such as jazz, blues, Cajun, Zydeco, swamp pop, country, and rock. Dotson also oversees the Press’s Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World Series; Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the Civil War series; Making the Modern South series; and Southern Biography series.

Recent titles

• The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern Civil Rights Activist's Journey, 1959—1964, by D’Army Bailey
• Executing Daniel Bright: Race, Loyalty, and Guerrilla Violence in a Coastal Carolina Community, 1861—1865, by Barton A. Myers
• Painting a Hidden Life: The Art of Bill Traylor, by Mechal Sobel
• Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, edited by LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long
• Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America, Meredith Mason Brown
• In The Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals, edited by William J. Cooper, Jr., and John M. McCardell, Jr.
• Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight against Civil Rights, 1938—1965, Keith M. Finley
• Walking with Legends: Barry Martyn's New Orleans Jazz Odyssey, edited by Mick Burns
• The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War, by Edward Bartlett Rugemer
• John Washington's Civil War: A Slave Narrative, edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by Crandall Shifflett
• Blacks, Carpetbaggers, and Scalawags: The Constitutional Conventions of Radical Reconstruction, by Richard L. Hume and Jerry B. Gough
• The New Orleans of Lafcadio Hearn: Illustrated Sketches from the Daily City Item, edited by Delia LaBarre
• Remember My Sacrifice: The Autobiography of Clinton Clark, Tenant Farm Organizer and Early Civil Rights Activist, edited by Elizabeth Davey and Rodney Clark