Lawrence Clayton
Clayton was born October 5, 1942, in Summit, New Jersey. He lived in Peru for seven years. He attended Duke University (B.A., 1964), and earned his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1972) at Tulane University in Latin American History. From 1964-1966 he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy on the USS Donner (LSD-20), cruising both in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean with the 6th Fleet.
He was on the faculty of the University of Alabama from 1972-2013. He directed the Latin American Studies Program from 1980 to 1992. He was Chair of Department of History 2000-2007 and was Interim Chair, 2009-2010. His specialties focused on Latin American history and the history of the Christian church. He is now Professor Emeritus of History. He retired in 2013.
He held two Senior Fulbright Lecturing Awards, one in 1983 to Costa Rica and one in 1988 to Peru. In 1983 he served as President of the South Eastern Council on Latin American Studies. In 1999 he held a year-long Pew Evangelical Scholars Fellowship.
Some of his publications include
The De Soto Chronicles (Tuscaloosa, 1993). Prize winning.
A History of Modern Latin America (3rd. ed. published as A New History of Modern Latin America ,University of California Press, 2017).
Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle (Athens, Georgia, 1999).
Cleared for Landing: On Living a Christian Life (2008).
Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (New York, 2011)
Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography (New York, 2012).
Work and Wealth in Scripture (Eugene, Oregon, 2015)
The Andean Cross: A Novel (Los Angeles, Ca., 2019)
My Christian Prism or at the Port Rail (Bloomington, In., 2019)
· Three of his books have been translated and published in Peru and Ecuador.
He is working on the script to a new movie on the Doolittle Raid of 1942; and on several book projects, including his Memoirs. The best of his OpEds published in The Tuscaloosa News and elsewhere was published in 2019, as was his first novel, The Andean Cross,
He and his wife Louise have two daughters and a son, Carlton, who is a pilot with Elite Air, Tampa. Oldest daughter Amy Alderman, M.D. (UAB) is a plastic surgeon in Alpharetta, Georgia, and Stephanie Clayton Richmond, next oldest, is Executive Vice President for Papa Murphy’s Pizza in Portland, Oregon. Both daughters have two children.
Clayton has participated since 2000 in a Christian jail ministry program at the Tuscaloosa County Jail on a weekly basis, and his wife Louise is a licensed and ordained minister who teaches a Monday evening course on Christianity and the Bible to female inmates. They attend Victorious Life Church, Fosters, Al. Clayton also writes a weekly column, The Port Rail for The Tuscaloosa News that appears on Sundays in the Op-ed section.
In November, 2015 he was inducted as a Knight Commander of the Imperial Order of Charles V, in the Alcazar Palace, Segovia, Spain. In 2018, he was inducted into the Royal Hispanic American Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters in Cadiz, Spain