Skip to main navigation Skip to search Skip to main content
Raymond O. Arsenault

View Scopus Profile

Raymond O. Arsenault

Professor, John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History

Personal profile

About

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History in the Department of History and Politics at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, where he has taught since 1980. A specialist in the political, social, environmental, and civil rights history of the American South, he has also taught at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, the Florida State University Study Abroad Center in London, and the Universite d’Angers, in France, where he was a Fulbright Lecturer in 1984-85. A native of Cape Cod, he was educated at Princeton University and Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1981.

Arsenault is the author or editor of eight books: The Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics (1984); St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, 188-1950 (1988, Pbk. 1996); Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights (1991); The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968 (2002), co-edited with Roy Peter Clark; Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida (2005), co-edited with Jack E. Davis; Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2006; abridged ed. 2011); and The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America (2009). His most recent book, co-edited with Orville Vernon Burton, is Dixie Redux: Essays in Honor of Sheldon Hackney (2013), a tribute to his late mentor, a noted academic leader and champion of civil rights. Arsenault has won several best book awards, and in 1985 his article “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” Journal of Southern History (November 1984), won the Green – Ramsdell Prize awarded by the Southern Historical Association.

Freedom Riders, published by Oxford University Press as part of the Pivotal Moments in American History series, was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, selected as one of the Washington Post BookWorld’s Best Books of the Year, and awarded the 2007 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize of the Southern Historical Association, as the most important book published in the field of Southern history in 2006. The abridged version of Freedom Riders, published in 2011, is the companion volume to the acclaimed American Experience documentary film Freedom Riders, which won three Emmys for writing, editing, and documentary excellence, and a 2012 George Peabody Award. Arsenault is currently writing a biography of the legendary African-American tennis star and public intellectual Arthur Ashe.

Education/Academic qualification

American History, Ph.D., Brandeis University

American History, M.A., Brandeis University

History, B.A., Princeton University

Disciplines

  • History
  • United States History
View all 66 Research outputs
View all 17 prizes