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Charles Hudson, Franklin Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia, passed away peacefully in his home on June 8, 2013, at the age of eighty. Charlie was the foremost scholar on the history and culture of Indians of the American South. He was a professor of anthropology and history at the University of Georgia for over forty years, during which time he laid the groundwork for two fundamental changes in the study of the prehistory and history of the Native peoples of the American South. Charlie authored or co-authored nine monographs, edited or coedited five anthologies, wrote three pieces of historical fiction, and published dozens of articles and book chapters on the Southeastern Indians. He also served on the board of editors for Native South from its inception until his death.
Born in Monterey, Kentucky, in 1932, Charlie grew up on a small tobacco farm, until the age of fifteen when the family moved to Frankfort, Kentucky. After high school Charlie joined the Air Force in July 1950. He was in communications intelligence and spent three years in Japan. Returning from the service Charlie attended the University of Kentucky on the gi Bill, where he discovered the field of anthropology. In 1959 Charlie earned an ab degree with honors and afterward entered graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Charlies dissertation fieldwork was with the Catawba Indians. However, trained in mid-twentieth-century anthropology that was largely ahistorical, Charlie found himself unprepared to understand the historical contingencies that had contributed to the development of the contemporary Catawba people-people whom he found to be little differ- ent from the rural, poor, southern farmers he grew up with in Kentucky. This lack of historical context began to nag at him.
Charlie joined the faculty of the University of Georgia (uga) in 1964. He soon began teaching a...