John C. Rodrigue

Biography

John Rodrigue joined Stonehill's faculty in 2007 as the Lawrence and Theresa Salameno Professor of History. He previously taught at Louisiana State University, and he was an editor on the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. 

His teaching and research focus on nineteenth-century United States history and Southern history, in particular the Civil War and Reconstruction era, and slavery and emancipation.

Rodrigue most recently published Freedom's Crescent: The Civil War and the Destruction of Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He has also published Lincoln and Reconstruction for Southern Illinois University Press's Concise Lincoln Library series (2013), and Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes (LSU Press, 2001). He is co-editor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Series 3, Volume 1. Land and Labor: 1865 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). In addition, he is general editor of Louisiana: A History, published by John Wiley & Sons, a college-level textbook.

Rodrigue served as president of the Louisiana Historical Association from 2016 to 2017, and he was elected to the association's Company of Fellows in 2019.

Education

• Ph.D., Emory University
• M.A., Columbia University
• B.A., Rutgers University

Courses Taught

• Abolition and Proslavery Thought 
• American Civil War & Reconstruction
• From Jackson to Lincoln
• History of American Freedom
• Lincoln and His America 
• United States History Seminar