Walter Edgar's Journal

English naturalist Mark Catesby’s love of exploration and learning lives on through a new program, entitled Creating a Better Way to Learn, developed by the Catesby Commemorative Trust in association with local educational entities.

Speaking Down Barriers is a non-profit group created by Marlanda Dekine and Scott Neely with a goal to “[transform] our life together across our differences through performance, consultation, trainings, and dialogue.” Dekine and Neely join Dr. Edgar to talk about the program’s efforts and goals.

Sandra E. Johnson talks with Walter Edgar about her latest novel, Flowers for the Living. The novel tells the story of how a suicidal African-American teenager's forcing a young white cop to kill him devastates the teenager’s mother as well the rookie cop. It also sparks a massive race riot and puts the mother and rookie in the cross hairs of a deranged gunman.

New York Times bestselling author Ron Rash demonstrates his superb narrative skills in this suspenseful and evocative tale of two brothers whose lives are altered irrevocably by the events of one long-ago summer—and one bewitching young woman—and the secrets that could destroy their lives.

In An Encyclopedia of South Carolina Jazz and Blues Musicians, Benjamin Franklin V documents the careers of South Carolina jazz and blues musicians from the nineteenth century to the present. The musicians range from the renowned (James Brown, Dizzy Gillespie), to the notable (Freddie Green, Josh White), to the largely forgotten (Fud Livingston, Josie Miles), to the obscure (Lottie Frost Hightower...

Two hundred and two years after the birth of Henry William Ravenel, a 19th century South Carolina planter and botanist, a dedicated team from North Carolina and South Carolina universities and colleges has made his manuscripts and collections available online.

All history is “local history” to someone. And the preservation, interpretation, and presentation of local history rest on the efforts of countless individuals in communities around the Palmetto State. This week, Dr. Edgar talks with three individuals who know well what it takes to discover and preserve the history of local communities: Dr. Eric Emerson, Director of the South Carolina Department o...

Hobcaw Barony is a 16,000 acre tract on the Waccamaw Neck, between the Winyah Bay and the Atlantic Ocean in Georgetown County, SC. Once owned by the investor, philanthropist, presidential advisor, and South Carolina native Bernard M. Baruch, the property was used as a hunting preserve between 1905 and 1907. It is now owned and operated by the non-profit Belle W. Baruch Foundation as a site for res...

Becoming Southern Writers: Essays in Honor of Charles Joyner (2016, USC Press) is a collection of essays that pay tribute to the late South Carolinian Charles Joyner’s more than fifty years as a writer of Southern history, folklore, music and literature. (Dr. Joyner died on Tuesday, September 13, 2016.) The contributors, exceptional writers of fact, fiction, and poetry, describe their experiences...

In her book, Revolutionary Mothers: Women and the Struggle for American Independence (2015, Knopf) Dr. Carol Berkin makes the argument that the American Revolution is a story of both women and men. Women played an active and vital role in the war; although history books have often greatly minimized or completely left out the contributions of women in the creation of our nation, or greatly romantic...

The Middleton Place Foundation is helping to share the artistic legacy of Charleston Renaissance artist Alice Ravenel Huger Smith with exhibits at the Middleton Place House Museum and the Edmondston-Alston House, a Smith exhibit from October 23, 2016, to June 17, 2017.

(Originally broadcast 02/07/15) -In an encore from the 2015 series, Conversations on the Civil War, sponsored by the University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Humanities, William Cooper talks with Walter Edgar about the life of Jefferson Davis, an American soldier and politician who became president of the Confederate States of America.

(Originally broadcast 07/05/13) - Dr. Mark Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, takes part in this discussion of the battle of Gettysburg, which marked the beginning of the end of the Confederate States’ rebellion in the American Civil War. Smith is widely considered America's leading practitioner of the new and burgeoning field of "sensory histor...

Betsy Fleming, outgoing president of Converse College in Spartanburg, talks with Walter Edgar about her 11 years leading the 125-year-old institution dedicated to offering women a high quality, liberal arts education. Fleming became President of Converse in October 2005. After reducing the tuition by 43 percent, the school became a national leader in affordability and value. Fleming has said that...

The Charleston World Heritage Commission's mission is to nominate iconic buildings and landscapes representative of the Charleston Lowcountry, plantation-driven culture as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – the highest cultural and historic designation bestowed on a place or site.

In his 40 years as Mayor of Charleston, Joe Riley has led the historic port city through its greatest period of growth, economic development and unity. His authorized biography, The Mayor: Joe Riley and the Rise of Charleston (Evening Post Publishing Company, 2015), is the inside story of his life and how he built -- and forever transformed -- one of the nation's oldest cities.

(Originally broadcast 02/19/16) - In his book, Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756 - 1763, (2015, UNC Press) Dr. Daniel J. Tortora, assistant professor of history at Colby College, explores how the Anglo-Cherokee War reshaped the political and cultural landscape of the colonial South. Tortora joins Walter Edgar for a discussion of these events in on...

(Originally broadcast 02/12/16) - In January and February of 2016 the University Of South Carolina College Of Arts and Sciences’ Institute of Southern presented a series of public conversations with Dr. Walter Edgar and guest scholars: “Conversations on Colonial and Revolutionary South Carolina”. In this first conversation, Dr. Larry Rowland talks with Dr. Edgar about “The Colonial Melting Pot.”

On Mother's Day 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Kingstree, South Carolina and gave a remarkable public speech urging the audience of more than 5,000 to exercise their right to vote as a means to pursue social and economic justice. On August 6, 1965—just a eight months prior to Dr. King's speech— President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, allowing the majority of Kings...

In December of 2015, the Pulitzer Prize Board awarded a grant to Humanities SC for From the Jazz Age to the Digital Age: Pulitzer Prize Winners in South Carolina, a program to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Prizes in 2016 through Pulitzer’s Campfires Initiative. Humanities SC has partnered with SCETV to produce three, 30-minute TV programs spotlighting the state’s Pulitzer winners, hoste...

The radical changes wrought by the rise of the salon system in nineteenth-century Europe provoked an interesting response from painters in the American South. Painterly trends emanating from Barbizon and Giverny introduced a visual vocabulary of style, color, and content that was soon successfully adopted by American artists. Many painters in the South took up the stylistics of Tonalism, Impressio...

Pat Conroy, the beloved author of The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides, died March 4, among his family, at home in Beaufort, S.C. He was 70 years old. He had announced his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in early February.

Pat Conroy, the beloved author of The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides, has died. Conroy — who announced last month that he had pancreatic cancer — died, March 4, at his home among his family in Beaufort, S.C. He was 70 years old.

General U.S. history courses in many high schools depict the American Revolutionary War as a series of battles in the Northeast--Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, etc.--that lead inexorably to British General Charles Cornwallis's surrender of 8,000 British soldiers and seamen to a French and American force at Yorktown, Virginia, October 19, 1781.

With today's news of the death of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Harper Lee, at age 89, we offer two encore episodes of Walter Edgar's Journal, each dealing with her book To Kill a Mockingbird.