Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears

The book

In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. government shifted its policy from trying to assimilate American Indians to relocating them, and proceeded to forcibly drive seventeen thousand Cherokees from their homelands. This journey of exile became known as the Trail of Tears.

Historians Perdue and Green reveal the government betrayals and the divisions within the Cherokee Nation, follow the exiles along the Trail of Tears, and chronicle the hardships found in the West. In its trauma and tragedy, the Cherokee diaspora has come to represent the irreparable injustice done to Native Americans in the name of nation building and in their determined survival, it represents the resilience of the Native American spirit.


The authors

Theda Perdue is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the Native peoples of the southeastern United States and on gender in Native societies. Her book, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998), won the Southern Association of Women’s Historians’ Julia Cherry Spruill Award and the Southern Anthropological Society’s James Mooney Prize. She is past president of the American Society for Ethnohistory, editor of the anthology, Sifters: The Lives of Native American Women (2001), and coauthor, with Michael D. Green, of the Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001) and The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (2007). Her Lamar Lectures at Mercer University were published as "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (2003), and her most recent book is Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition (2010).

Dr. Green is a distinguished historian of American Indians, and a founder of the American Indian Studies program in the American Studies Department on campus. This lecture series recognizes his achievements by inviting a leading scholar in the field of American Indian Studies to give a public lecture.

Dr. Green’s book, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982) was one of the first works to examine the federal policy of Indian Removal from a particular tribal perspective. He has subsequently co-authored a number of books aimed at making American Indian history accessible to students and professional historians. These include The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction, and The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast.


The reader

George K. Wilson has narrated over one hundred fiction and nonfiction audiobook titles, from Thomas L. Friedman to Thomas Pynchon, and has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards. He spent ten years in broadcast news, including for the American Forces Radio and Television Service and for rock radio in San Diego and Los Angeles. An American Academy of Dramatic Arts, West, graduate, his acting career includes stage, film, television, commercials, improvisational comedy, and stand-up. George has written and performed in over five hundred nationally syndicated short news satire features for public radio and NPR and has received a national Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Award for Best Public Service Program. He has also scripted and hosted corporate videos for Sony, Merck, IBM, and Price Waterhouse. He is currently working on a suspense short story collection and a thriller novel.