Claudio Saunt

Claudio Saunt is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History and Co-Director of the Center for Virtual History at the University of Georgia. A scholar of Native and early American history, he is the author of four award-winning 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: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (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.” 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. The project, existing online, develops an argument in visual form, showing how white supremacy was built on top of the recent deportation of Native peoples and the erasure of Indigenous homesteads.