Claudio Saunt

Historian | Author | Teacher

About

Claudio Saunt is Richard B. Russell Professor in American History, Regents' Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. He is the author of four books, including West of the Revolution (2014), Black, White, and Indian (2005), and A New Order of Things (1999). His most recent book, Unworthy Republic (2020), was awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the Ridenhour Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has developed several online projects, including the Invasion of America and, with Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana. In 2018, he received an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant to produce an online, interactive time-lapse map of the African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1800. Supported by a 2022 Guggenheim fellowship, his current project, "The Land Beneath Our Feet," maps in depth and detail the Cherokee families who lost their homes in the 1830s, creating a virtual representation of the Cherokee Nation just before the United States drove its sixteen thousand citizens off their farms and across the Mississippi River [See CV for more.]

Praise for Unworthy Republic

Listen to Jennifer Szalai of the New York Times speak about Unworthy Republic.

  • Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History.
  • Winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
  • Winner of the Ridenhour Book Prize.
  • Finalist for the National Book Award.
  • A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020.
  • Selected by the Washington Post as one of the ten best books of 2020.
  • Selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of 2020.
  • Selected by The Atlantic as one of the fifteen best books of 2020.
  • Selected by the Boston Globe as one of the best books of 2020.
  • Shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature.

    • The “definitive history of this widely remembered but seldom understood central episode in American history…. [O]ne of the most important books published on U.S. history in recent years.” - Sven Beckert, Laird Professor of History, Harvard University

    A “study in power…. The parallels with the present are eerie.” - David Treuer, Foreign Affairs

    “timely, provocative, heart-wrenching, and original - a riveting story that invites us all to reflect on how we got where we are today.” - Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World

    An “extraordinary new history" and "a major achievement.” - Nick Romeo, Washington Post

    A “haunting story of racialized cruelty and greed." - Caitlin Fitz, The Atlantic

    "Unworthy Republic is a power and lucid account.... Saunt has written an unflinching book that reckons with this history and its legacy." - Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

    A “much-needed rendering of a disgraceful episode in American history that has been too long misunderstood." - Peter Cozzens, Wall Street Journal

    Praise for West of the Revolution

  • Shortlisted for the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature.
  • Winner of the Harry M. Ward Prize for the best book on the American Revolution published in 2014 and 2015.

    • “As compelling and awful as a ghost story …. [A] masterful portrait.” - Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

    “Brilliant.” - Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

    “A necessary counternarrative to our enlightened Revolution.” - Los Angeles Times

    “A significant contribution to our understanding of this volatile and formative period.” - Doug Kiel, Chicago Tribune

    Praise for Black, White, and Indian

  • Winner of the Clements Prize for the best non-fiction book on Southwestern America.

    • “speaks volumes about the complexities and complications that arise out of the American obsession with race” - Murray Wickett, Journal of Southern History

    A “work for the ages” - James F. Brooks, author of Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre

    “Meticulously researched, eloquently written, and full of the pain of slavery, dispossession, racism, and history itself” - Philip J. Deloria, Harvard University

    Praise for A New Order of Things

  • Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award for the best book in Southern history.
  • Winner of the Wheeler-Voegelin Award for the best book in Ethnohistory.

    • “rare insight and flashes of brilliance” - Michael D. Green, American Historical Review

    “Saunt makes his case cogently, even brilliantly” - Edward J. Cashin, William and Mary Quarterly

    Unworthy Republic (W.W. Norton, 2020)

    In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elizabeth Fenn as “a much-needed corrective to the American canon,” Unworthy Republic reveals how slave owners pushed to make the expulsion of indigenous Americans national policy and describes the chaotic and deadly results of the operation to deport 80,000 men, women, and children from their eastern homelands. Unworthy Republic "manages to do something truly rare," writes Nick Romeo in the Washington Post: “destroy the illusion that history’s course is inevitable and recover the reality of the multiple possibilities that confronted contemporaries.”

    West of the Revolution (W.W. Norton, 2014)

    West of the Revolution invites readers to extend their bounds and discover the continent beyond the British colonies, specifically nine American places in 1776. The settings are diverse, stretching from the Aleutian Islands to San Diego, and from the Florida Gulf Coast to the Saskatchewan River. Yet, there are surprising connections between them, sometimes through trade networks that intersected in distant warehouses, at other times through imperial administrators who plotted far-flung colonies on maps that contained more fiction than fact. As the book illustrates, Americans across the continent faced revolutionary changes that were diffuse but powerful, unmanageable and often beyond their comprehension.

    Black, White, and Indian (Oxford UP, 2005)

    Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family, tells the story of a Native American family with a long-kept secret: one branch is of African descent. Focusing on five generations from 1780 to 1920, the book illustrates how Indians disowned their black relatives to survive in the shadow of the expanding American republic. The Times Literary Supplement describes Black, White, and Indian as an "excellent and absorbing book" and Booklist calls it a “fascinating look at a seldom-recognized aspect of American race relations.”

    A New Order of Things (Cambridge UP, 1999)

    A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 explores a dramatic transformation that overturned the lives of the Creek Indians and remade the Deep South in the 1700s. It vividly describes the changing world of the Creeks, showing how growing divisions between wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless, ultimately destroyed their communities. This critical but unknown chapter in the creation of the United States cleared the way for the expansion of plantation slavery.

    Digital Projects

    • Mapping the People of Early America, an online interactive time-lapse map of the African, Native, and European populations in North America between 1500 and 1800. To be launched in early 2021.
    • Invasion of America. See every Native American land cession between the formation of the Republic and 1887.
    • Pox Americana. Watch the great smallpox epidemic of the 1770s unfold in North America. Based on Elizabeth Fenn's award-winning book Pox Americana.
    • US News Map. Search and map over eleven million newspaper pages between 1789 and 1922.

    Popular Articles

    Academic Articles

    • “Population Counts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 28, no. 2 (April 2021):251-60.
    • “Financing Dispossession: Stocks, Bonds, and the Deportation of Native Peoples in the Antebellum United States,” The Journal of American History, 106 (Sept. 2019): 315-37.
    • “The Age of Imperial Expansion,” The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick Hoxie (Oxford University Press, 2016), 77-92.
    • “Mapping Space, Power, and Social Life,” Social Text 33 (Dec. 2015): 142-47.
    • “Twenty-First-Century Perspectives on the Eighteenth: Comments on the American Revolution Reborn,” Common-place 14 (Spring, 2014).
    • “‘My Medicine is Punishment': A Case of Torture in Early California, 1775-1776,” Ethnohistory 57 (2010): 679-708.
    • “The Native South: An Account of Recent Historiography,” Native South 1 (2008): 45-60.
    • “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography,” The William and Mary Quarterly 65 (Oct. 2008): 745-78.
    • “Telling Stories: The Political Uses of Myth and History in the Cherokee and Creek Nations,” The Journal of American History 93 (Dec. 2006): 673-97.
    • “‘Our Indians’: European Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, eds. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Prentice Hall, 2006), 61-76.
    • “The Graysons’ Dilemma: A Creek Family Confronts the Science of Race,” in Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, eds. Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Second edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 503-520.
    • “Rethinking Race and Culture in the Early South,” Ethnohistory 53:2 (spring 2006): 399-406. (Coauthor)
    • “Contact and Colonial History: 1500-1776,” in the Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians: Southeast, ed. Raymond D. Fogelson (Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 128-138.
    • “The Paradox of Freedom: Tribal Sovereignty and Emancipation during the Reconstruction of Indian Territory,” The Journal of Southern History 70 (Feb. 2004): 63-94. Winner of the 2006 Green and Ramsdell Award for the best article published in The Journal of Southern History in 2004 and 2005.
    • “Taking Account of Property: Social Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly 24 (Oct. 2000): 733-760.
    • “‘The English has now a Mind to make Slaves of them all’: Creeks, Seminoles, and the Problem of Slavery,” American Indian Quarterly 22 (1998): 157-181. Winner of the 1999 Bolton-Kinnaird Award for the best journal article on Spanish borderlands history. Given by the Western History Association.
    • “‘Domestick...Quiet being broke’: Gender Conflict among Creek Indians in the Eighteenth Century,” in Contact Points: North American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830, eds. Fredrika J. Teute and Andrew R.L. Cayton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998), 151-174.