You're listening to the History Extra Podcast brought to you by the team behind BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Matt Elton. Today's podcast is the historian Claudio Sant, Professor of History at the University of Georgia.

Claudio is the author of Unworthy Republic,

The Disposition of Native Americans and The Road to Indian Territory,

one of the books shortlisted for this year's Kundal Prize, of which History Extra is a media partner.

I caught up with Claudio to find out more.

Your book covers a story about the expulsion of Native American people, which is a story about the expulsion of Native American people which is a story I think I knew the very

broad outlines of but not the specifics and not the human stories.

First of all, would you mind just very briefly and broadly setting out the period your book covers and also the kind of scale involved?

Yeah, so the book Unworthy Republic treats what we call Indian removal, this period in the 1830s, when the federal

government had an official policy to move every single indigenous person living within the United

States west of the Mississippi River.

And it's important to recall that in the 1830s,

the states were limited to the area east of the Mississippi.

So the area west was largely owned by Mexico.

There were some US territories, however,

west of the Mississippi River.

And so they had set those aside

and they were calling, they were going to call them Indian

territory and move indigenous Americans there.

So we're talking about 80,000 people in the 1830s. The population had had declined significantly since 1500 and

obviously there had been many efforts and conflicts, wars that had pushed people west.

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