Honoring Claudio Saunt
Tuesday, October 24, 2005
The DeGolyer Library,6404 Hilltop Lane
Southern Methodist University
6:00 pm reception, followed by 6:30 award ceremony, lecture and book signing
"All histories, especially family histories, harbor silences wherein uneasy truths reside. But few such histories - once those silences grow full with stories - speak so directly to the central sorrows in American society, past and present, as that of the Grayson family. Claudio Saunt's sensitive and daring recovery of the Graysons' centuries-long struggle to navigate the perilous racial triangle of Black, white and Indian is at once irresistible and heartbreaking. It is a work for the ages."
---James F. Brooks, director of the School of American Research, Santa Fe, NM, and author of Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America.
Claudio Saunt teaches and writes about Native and early American history at the University of Georgia where he is associate professor of history. Originally from San Francisco, he studied at Columbia University (B.A.'89), worked in Italy for a year and then attended Duke University (Ph.D. '96). His first book, A New Order of Things: Property, Power and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), traces the emergence of deep divisions between the wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless, in Creek communities in the Southeast.
The $2,500 Clements Book Prize honors fine writing and original research on the American Southwest. The competition is open to any nonfiction book, including biography, on any aspect of Southwestern life, past or present. The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies is part of SMU's Dedman College and affiliated with the Department of History. It was created to promote research, publishing, teaching and public programming in a variety of fields related to the American Southwest. For more information about the Center or about the upcoming book prize event, please call (214) 768-3684 or see http://smu.edu/swcenter/prize.htm.
Directions and maps to sites frequently used for Clements Center events at SMU.
Visitor Parking at SMU.
Last updated August 10, 2006.
