Theda Perdue Shares Her Book, The Cherokee Nation and The Trail of Tears On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, August 22, at 9:30 PM

All Cherokees once lived in the southern Appalachians. They spoke four, mutually-intelligible dialects of an Iroquoian language. A common culture and bonds of kinship held their far-flung villages together and made them a people. Today, most Cherokees do not live in the Southeast; they live in eastern Oklahoma with only a small remnant remaining in the mountains of western North Carolina.

This relocation of the Cherokees was not by choice. In the early nineteenth century, the United States government forced the Cherokee Nation to surrender its homeland and move west of the Mississippi—a journey forever known as the Trail of Tears. Theda Perdue and long-time collaborator Michael D. Green apply their expertise to a fascinating, and, at times, heartbreaking chapter in American history with their book, The Cherokee Nation and The Trail of Tears.

In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Friday, August 22, at 9:30 PM, co-author Theda Perdue brings to life The Cherokee Nation and The Trail of Tears and the historic struggles that defined The Trail of Tears as a Cherokee and American tragedy.

Recently appointed to a Guggenheim Fellowship last month, Theda Perdue is a Distinguished Term Professor of History, University of North Carolina, and Chapel Hill. An expert in the field of American Indian history, she also won the Southern Association of Women’s Historians’ Julia Cherry Spruill Award and the Southern Anthropological Society’s James Mooney Prize. She served as President of the American Society for Ethno history and from 2003-4 she was a fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Don’t miss DG Martin’s all-new interview with Theda Perdue on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, August 22, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, August 24, at 5 PM.