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Lawrence Clayton
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About Lawrence A. Clayton

Lawrence A. Clayton was born October 5, 1942, in Summit, New Jersey. He lived in Peru for seven years. He attended Duke University (BA, 1964), and earned his MA (1969) and PhD (1972) at Tulane University in Latin American History. From 1964 to 1966 he served as an officer in the US Navy on the USS Donner (LSD-20), cruising both in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean with the 6th Fleet. He was Gunnery (Weapons) Officer.

He was on the faculty of the University of Alabama from 1972 to 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 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.

In November 2015 he was inducted as a Knight Commander of the Imperial Order of Charles V in the Alcazar Palace, Segovia, Spain. In February 2017, he was also inducted into the Royal Hispanic American Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters in Cadiz, Spain.

Publications and Papers

Books:

  1. Los astilleros de Guayaquil colonial.  Guayaquil: Archivo Histórico del Guayas, 1978.
  2. Caulkers and Carpenters in the New World:  The Shipyards of Colonial Guayaquil.  Athens, Ohio: Center for International Studies, 1980. A revised translation of Los astilleros de Guayaquil.
  3. The Bolivarian Nations.  Arlington Heights, Illinois: Forum Press, 1984.
  4. Alabama and the Borderlands:  From Prehistory to Statehood co-edited with Reid Badger.  University: Alabama:  University of Alabama Press, 1985.
  5. Grace: W. R. Grace & Co., The Formative Years,1850-1930. Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1985.
  6. The Hispanic Experience in North America: Sources for Study in the United States. Editor. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1992.
  7. The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543. co-edited with Vernon James Knight, Jr. and Edward C. Moore. 2 vols. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1993.
  8. Merchant Adventurer: The Story of W. R. Grace, by Marquis James. Introduction by L. Clayton. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Press, 1993.
  9. Las relaciones peruano-estadounidenses desde la época de la independencia hasta el siglo xx. in XVI Cuadernos de Historia. Lima, Peru: Universidad de Lima, 1993. Lectures delivered as a Fulbright Scholar in Lima, 1988.
  10. A History of Modern Latin America. co-authored with Michael L. Conniff. Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt, Brace, 1999. 2nd  Edition. Wadsworth Publishers, 2005. 3rd. edition, University of California Press, 2017, retitled to A New History of Modern Latin America.
  11. Los EE.UU. y el Perú: 1800-1995. Lima, Peru: Centro Peruano de Estudios Internaciones y Xerox del Peru, 1998. 2nd edition, June 2002.
  12. Peru and the United States: The Condor and the Eagle. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1999.
  13. R. Grace & Co.: los años formativos, 1850-1930. Translation of Grace: W. R. Grace & Co., The Formative Years,1850-1930. Lima, Peru: Thalassa, 2008. New Introduction and Epilog.
  14. Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2011.
  15. Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
  16. Cleared for Landing: On Living a Christian Life. Xlibris, 2008
  17. The Andean Cross. A Matthew Western novel. JustFiction!Edition. Saarbrücken, Germany, 2012.
  18. Work and Wealth in Scripture. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, Publishers, 2015.
  19. A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas. Introduction by L. A. Clayton. In a series entitled Christian Classics. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Regimen Books, 2017.
  20. My Christian Prism, or the Best of the Port Rail. Indianapolis, Indiana: Archway Publishers, a Division of Simon & Schuster, 2019.
  21. Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Introduction by Lawrenc A. Clayton. In a series entitled Christian Classics. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Regimen Books, 2020.
  22. Election 2020 Reader: Your Essential Christian Guide to the 2020 Presidential Election. Westwood Books, 2020.
  23. Memoirs of a Southern, Yankee, Hispanic. 2022.
  24. The Push Back. Fulton Books, 2022.
  25. A New Tale of Two Cities. 2022.
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Contributions to Books

  • “A Shared Prosperity:  W. R. Grace & Co. and Modern Peru, 1852-1952,” Robert Claxton, ed. Studies in the Social Sciences.  Carrollton, Georgia:  West Georgia College, 1978.
  • “Maritime Exploration,” Helen Delpar, ed. The Discoverers:  An Encyclopedia of Explorers and Exploration.  New York: McGraw Hill, 1979, pp. 381-390.
  • “Trade and Navigation in the Seventeenth Century Viceroyalty of Peru” article republished in John J. Johnson, Peter Bakewell, and Meredith Dodge, eds. Readings in Latin American History.  Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1985.
  • “Merchant Adventurer: William R. Grace,” in Judith Ewell and William H. Beezley, eds. and contributors, The Human Tradition in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1989.
  • “Early Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Peru,” T. Ray Shurbutt, ed., United States-Latin American Relations:  the Formative Generation  (University of Alabama Press, 1991).
  • “Bartolomé de las Casas and His Spiritual Awakening,” pp. 120-132 in Toward the Year 2000: Points of Convergence in the Americas, Proceedings of the Fourth Biennial Americas Conference, Tampa, Florida, January, 1998.
  • “Peru and the United States, 1850-1903” in Thomas Leonard, ed., United States and Latin America, 1850-1903: Establishing a Relationship (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, Feb., 1999).
  • “The Iberian Advantage,” in George Raudzen, ed. Technology, Disease and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries : Essays  Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories
  •                (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001).
  • “Teaching Bartolomé de las Casas through the Lens of the Historian,” in Teaching Las Casas, edited and with introductions by Eyda Merediz and Santa Arias, to be published in 2008 by the Modern Language Association.
  • “Bartolomé de las Casas.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies. Ed. Ben Vinson. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
  • “Biographies of Bartolomé de las Casas” in Oxford Companion to Las Casas, edited by Michael Oborne and Philippe André Rodríguez, University of Oxford, forttcoming, 2016.

Articles:

  • “Guayaquil y la defensa de la hegemonía española en el Pacífico oriental durante los siglos XVI y XVII,” Revista del Archivo Histórico del Guayas, Guayaquil, Ecuador, núm. 4 (Diciembre, 1973), 27-46.
  • “Notes on the Shipwreck of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, a Seventeenth Century Peruvian Merchantman,” South Eastern Latin Americanist, 17:4 (March, 1974), 1-6.
  • “Local Initiative and Finance in Defense of the Viceroyalty of Peru:  The Development of Self-Reliance,” Hispanic American Historical Review,  54:2 (May, 1974, 284-304.
  • “Documentos en el Archivo General de Indias para el estudio de la historia marítima y comercial de Guayaquil en el siglo XVII,” Revista del Archivo Histórico del Guayas, núm. 7 (Deciembre, 1974).
  • “Trade and Navigation in the Seventeenth Century Viceroyalty of Peru,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 7:1 (May, 1975), 1-21.
  • “Ships and Empire:  The Case of Spain,” The Mariner’s Mirror, 62:3 (August, 1976), 235-248.
  • “Sources in Lima for the Study of the Colonial Consulado of Peru,” The Americas, 33:3 (January, 1977), 457-469.
  • “A Comment on ‘Latin American Studies,'”  Latin American Research Review, 12:2 (Summer, 1977), 243-247.
  • “Cañones en Cañete 1615:  la Armada Real del Mar del Sur y la defensa del virreinato del Perú,” Memoria del Tercer Congreso Venezolano de Historia.  3 vols.; Caracas, Venezuela:  Academia Nacional de Historia, 1979, 443-462.
  • “Comercio y navegación en el virreinato del Perú durante el siglo XVII,” Revista del Archivo Histórico del Guayas, 8:1 (Diciembre, 1979), 39-59.
  • “Chinese Indentured Labour in Peru,” History Today, 30 (June, 1980), 19-23.
  • “The Borderlands Revisited,”  Latin American Research Review, 15:3 (1980), 261-265.
  • “Melting Pot Mayor:  William Russell Grace and the Election of 1880,” Columbia Library Columns, 30:1 (November, 1980), 28-34.  Reprinted by W. R. Grace & Co., April, 1981.
  • “Life at Sea in Colonial Spanish America:  The New World Experience,” Paul Adam, ed., Proceedings of the International Commission of Maritime History (Bucharest, 1980), Part III, pp. 16-39.
  • “Galleons for the Royal South Seas Fleet:  Naval Shipyards in the New World,” Aspects of Naval History:  Proceedings of the Fourth Naval History Symposium.  Annapolis:  Naval History Symposium, 1981.
  • “John Tyler Morgan and the Nicaragua Canal, 1897-1900,” South Eastern Latin Americanist, 27:2 (September, 1983), 1-22.
  • “John Tyler Morgan y el Canal de Nicaragua, 1897-1900.” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos, 9 (1983), 37-53.
  • “The Columbian Exchange:  Five Hundred Years Later,” Bulletin of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Studies, 10:1 (Jan., 1985), 4-8.
  • “On Patriotism, Peace, and Neutrality,” South Eastern Latin Americanist, 28:4 (March, 1985), 21-23.
  • “Private Matters:  The Origins and Nature of United States Peruvian Relations, 1820-1850,” The Americas, 42:4 (April, 1986), 377-417.
  • “The Maritime Trade of Peru in the Seventeenth Century,” The Mariner’s Mirror 72:2 (May, 1986), 159-177.
  • “The Spanish Heritage of the Southeast,” Alabama Heritage, no.4 (Spring, 1987), 2-11.
  • “The Nicaragua Canal in the Nineteenth Century: Prelude to American Empire” Journal of Latin American Studies. 19:2 (November, 1987), 323-352.
  • “Canal Morgan,” Alabama Review, 25 (Summer, 1992), 6-19.
  • “Twentieth Century Argonauts: First Flights Over the South Sea: A Brief History of Aerial Exploration of the Great South Sea in Honor of Alvaro de Mendaña,” Derroteros de la Mar del Sur  [journal published by the Asociación de Historia Marítima y Naval Iberoamericana (Peru), the Centro de Estudios Malaspiniacos “Alessandro Malaspina” (Italy),  the Patronato del Faro a Colón (Dominican Republic) and the Centro Franco Iberoamericano de Historia Marítima (France)], number 6 (1999), pp.       
  • “Las Casas, Mariner, 1502-1520,” Derroteros del al Mar del Sur, Año 7, 1999, Núm 7, 27-36.
  • “William Russell Grace,” in “Irish Migration Studies in Latin America” www.irlandeses.org ISSN 1661-6065 Volume 4, Number 4 (October 2006), pp. 263-266. Editors: Edmundo Murray and Claire Healy. Also to appear in Dictionary of Irish Latin American Biography.
  • “Bartolomé de las Casas and the African Slave Trade,” History Compass, published online Volume 7 Issue 6, Pages 1526 – 1541 .Published Online: 10 Sep 2009.© 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/
  • “Why Nobody Likes a Prophet: Bartolomé de las Casas, a Loud Voice in the Wilderness, Cogent Arts & Humanities (2016), 3: 1124480; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2015.1124480 
  • “La batalla de Mabila y Hernando de Soto en la historia de America, “Discurso de ingreso de nuevos academics, published online at Revista Digital, Real Academia Hispano Americana de Ciencias, Artes y Letras, Revista No. 8 (2018). http://revista.raha.es/actual.html 
  • James A. Martin, Lawrence A. Clayton & Michael W. Parker, “Looking back on wartime service: Reminiscence by James G. Van Straten,” Journal of Aging & Mental Health:DOI: 10.1080/13607863.2019.1609904.  

Works In Progress:  

His current projects include a new ms. on the iconic Bartolomé de las Casas for a British publisher, Boydell & Brewer. That book-length project was commissioned by the publisher and is finished and now under review for publication.

He has been working off and on the script to a new movie on the Doolittle Raid of 1942 with a colleague, Reginald Hyde. A professional script is now under preparation.

He is working on a second novel (the first one is listed above in some of his publications; its name is The Andean Cross) on the fourth missionary journey of the Apostle Paul to the nascent Christian communities of Spain, especially in the city of Cadiz. The first draft of that novel now finished and with a publisher, Stanford Books.!

Underway in different phases is volume two of his memoirs. The first is listed in the full CV attached, Memoir of a Southern, Yankee, Hispanic. 

He’s also working on a new novel on Americans in revolutionary Central America.

His next history book is a study of the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, focusing not only on Cuba but also the entire Central American region and major islands of Cuba and the Dominican Republic. 

He has written OpEds over the years for newspapers, all the way from the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor among those with national audiences, to the Tuscalaoosa News and the Northport Gazette for local and state readers.

Clayton was also a licensed pilot for over twenty years, flying largely small Cessna aircraft (he owned a Cessna 337, a Skymaster, for about fifteen years) before retiring from piloting about 2010.

He and his wife Louise have two daughters and a son, Carlton, who is a pilot with TMC Charter Jets. Clayton’s step-daughter, Amy Alderman, MD (UAB) is a plastic surgeon in Alpharetta, Georgia, and Stephanie Richmond, his next oldest, is the SVP of Human Resources for a major exercise corporation on the West Coast. Both daughters have two children.

Since 2000, Clayton has participated 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. Her weekly lesson on the Bible can be seen at www.biblestudywithlouiseclayton.com . The videographer is the writer, now videographer, her husband.

They attend New Harvest Community Church in Tuscaloosa. Clayton also writes a column, “The Port Rail” for the Northport Gazette that appears weekly.

In November 2015 he was inducted as a Knight Commander of the Imperial Order of Charles V in the Alcazar Palace, Segovia, Spain. In February 2017, he was also inducted into the Royal Hispanic American Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters in Cadiz, Spain.