Raymond Arsenault Wins Southern History Prize

Raymond Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, is the recipient of the 2007 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Award. Announced at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Richmond, Virginia, on November 1, the award recognizes Arsenault’s book, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, as the most important book published in the field of Southern history in 2006. A critically acclaimed study of the 1961 nonviolent movement that challenged the Jim Crow tradition of racially segregated buses, trains, and terminals, Freedom Riders was published as part the Pivotal Moments in American History series issued by Oxford University Press and co-edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historians David Hackett Fischer and James McPherson. Previously the book was selected as an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review, as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the Washington Post Bookworld, as a featured choice of the History Book Club, and as a 2006 Honorable Mention Outstanding Book by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Freedom Riders has also been selected for documentary film adaptation by WGBH-Boston’s “American Experience” public television series, with an expected release in May 2011, the fiftieth anniversary of the first Freedom Ride.