History Professor Discusses Trail of Tears and Cherokee Removal on Podcast

Adam Pratt, Ph.D., a professor in the History Department, discusses the Trail of Tears and Cherokee removal on the Alarmist, a podcast that "scrutinizes history’s greatest disasters to figure out what went wrong, and most importantly, who’s to blame," according to the show's website.  
History Professor Discusses Trail of Tears and Cherokee Removal on Podcast

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Adam Pratt, Ph.D., a professor in the History Department, discusses the Trail of Tears and Cherokee removal on the Alarmist, a podcast that "scrutinizes history’s greatest disasters to figure out what went wrong, and most importantly, who’s to blame," according to the show's website.  

His book, which focuses on how the state of Georgia used violence to acquire Cherokee territory, is titled Toward Cherokee Removal: Land, Violence and the White Man’s Chance was published on Nov. 1. 

"We don't know for certain how many native people died on the Trail of Tears. We estimate that for the Cherokees it's between 2,000 and 4,000, but there were roughly 16,000 Cherokees at the time so we're talking a quarter of the population died," he said in the interview. "It's a brutal process. It's a process that happens because of a lot of political and bureaucratic reasons that make it worse than it needed to be if it needed to happen at all."

Dr. Pratt teaches courses in 19th-century United States history, including upper-level courses on the Age of Andrew Jackson, Native American history and the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Listen to the podcast, here.

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