Walter Edgar's Journal

In his book, Revolutionary Roads: Searching for the War That Made America Independent...and All the Places It Could Have Gone Terribly Wrong (2022, Hachette), retired journalist Bob Thompson takes readers along, walking history-shaping battlefields of the American Revolution, from Georgia to Quebec; and hanging out with passionate lovers of revolutionary. In this episode of Walter Edgar’s Journal,...

June 16, 2023 — This week Dr. Jennifer Elfenbein will tell us about an innovative strategy undertaken by the town of Sumter, SC, in the early 1920s to try to survive the economic devastation that came about when the boll weevil came to the state devastating the town’s biggest cash crop: cotton. And that innovation involved the entire community of Sumter.

June 2, 2023 — People have been catching and eating shrimp off the coast of the Carolinas for centuries. The shrimping industry in South Carolina, however, only started about 100 years ago. And trawling, or “fishing,” for shrimp became a way of life in the Lowcountry, as well as a way of making a living. “Captain Woody” Collins was shrimping for 40 of those years and he has stories to tell...

Someone once said, “All roads lead to Rome.” Maybe...But longtime historian, author, and radio host Walter Edgar believes it’s a safer bet that all roads pass through South Carolina. And lot of them start here! For almost 23 years Walter Edgar’s Journal has been exploring the arts, culture, and history of South Carolina and the American South, to find out, among other things... the mysteries of ok...

In his new book, Carolina's Lost Colony: Stuarts Town and the Struggle for Survival in Early South Carolina (2022, USC Press), historian Peter N. Moore examines the dual colonization of Port Royal at the end of the seventeenth century. From the east came Scottish Covenanters, who established the small outpost of Stuarts Town. Meanwhile, the Yamasee arrived from the south and west. These European a...

Edgefield native Drew Lanham wasn’t entirely sure what the phone call from Chicago was about. And, after he heard what the person on the phone had to say, he wasn’t altogether sure he believed the news: Drew had just won a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant.”The MacArthur Foundation says that “The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic pract...

In his fresh and revealing biography, C. Vann Woodward: America's Historian (2022, UNC Press), James Cobb shows, explores how Woodward displayed a rare genius and enthusiasm for crafting lessons from the past that seemed directly applicable to the concerns of the present—a practice that more than once cast doubt on his scholarship. Dr. Cobb talks with Walter Edgar about Woodward and the changing i...

With his book, Crécy: Battle of Five Kings (2022, Osprey), Michael Livingston, professor of medieval history at The Citadel, has authored a remarkable new study on the Battle of Crécy, in which the outnumbered English under King Edward III won a decisive victory over the French and changed the course of the Hundred Years War. The repercussions of this battle, in which forces led by England’s King...

Since The Birth of a Nation became the first Hollywood blockbuster in 1915, movies have struggled to reckon with the American South—as both a place and an idea, a reality and a romance, a lived experience, and a bitter legacy. In The South Never Plays Itself: A Film Buff’s Journey Through the South on Screen (2023, UGA Press), author and film critic B. W. Beard explores the history of the Deep Sou...

In 1780, Camden was the oldest and largest town in the Carolina backcountry. It was strategic to both the British Army and the Patriots in the Revolutionary War. Following a series of strategic errors before and during the Battle of Camden, the Patriot army under command of Major General Horatio Gates was soundly defeated, ushering in changes in military leadership that altered the war’s course. I...

Mable Owens Clarke is the sixth-generation steward and matriarch of Soapstone Baptist Church in the rural Pickens County community of Liberia. In 1999, a few days before she died at the age of 104, Mable’s mother, Lula Mae, made her daughter promise never to let the historically Black church close. Mabel, along with Carlton Owen, President of the Soapstone Preservation Endowment, join Walter Edgar...

America’s independence was secured in South Carolina, across its swamps, fields, woods and mountains. These events of 1779-1782 directly led to victory in the Revolutionary War. The Liberty Trail – developed through a partnership between the American Battlefield Trust and the South Carolina Battleground Trust – connects battlefields across South Carolina and tells the stories of this transformativ...

George McDaniel served as the Executive Director of Drayton Hall, a mid-18th-century plantation located on the Ashley River near Charleston for more than 25 years. His new book, Drayton Hall Stories: A Place and Its People (2022, Evening Post Books) focuses on this historic site’s recent history, using interviews with descendants (both White and Black), board members, staff, donors, architects, hi...

Historic Columbia’s Boyd Foundation Horticultural Center, located on the grounds of the Hampton-Preston Mansion & Gardens on Blanding Street opened in 2022. Its greenhouse allows the historic site to serve as a hub for horticultural research and plant propagation, alongside ongoing interpretation, and programming. And, the facility serves as a space to interpret the role that an extensive workforc...

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened, and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed. In his book, Black Snow - Curtis LeMay, the Firebom...

In War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War, her path-breaking work on the American Civil War, Joan E. Cashin explores the struggle between armies and civilians over the resources necessary to wage war. This war 'stuff' included the skills of white Southern civilians, as well as such material resources as food, timber, and housing. At first, civilians...

In his latest book, Origins of The Wheel of Time: The Legends and Mythologies that Inspired Robert Jordan (2022, Tor), author Michael Livingston, a professor of medieval literature at The Citadel, takes a deep dive into the real-world history and mythology that inspired the world of the late Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. This series of books has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and has...

When the 11- and 12-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA all-star team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision. White teams refused to take the field with the Cannon Street all-stars, the first Black Little League team in South Carolina. The Cannon Street team won two tournaments by forfeit. If th...

In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work: The New Birth of Freedom from Generation to Generation (2022, LSU Press) analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize—or subvert—that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or t...

In this week's episode of Walter Edgar's Journal, Richard Gergel details the impact of the 1946 blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard on both President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring, and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America's civil rights history. Woodard, a returning, decorated African American veteran of World War II, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Bate...

In the months following the May 1780 capture of Charleston, South Carolina, by combined British and loyalist forces, British soldiers arrested sixty-three paroled American prisoners and transported them to the borderland town of St. Augustine, East Florida—territory under British control since the French and Indian War. In their new book, Patriots in Exile: Charleston Rebels in St. Augustine durin...

With an epic career that spanned two-thirds of the twentieth century, C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) was a historian of singular importance. A brilliant writer, his work captivated both academic and public audiences. He also figured prominently in the major intellectual conflicts between left and right during the last half of the twentieth century. In his fresh and revealing biography, C. Vann Woodw...

How did conceptions of a tradition-bound, "timeless" South shape Americans' views of themselves and their society's political and cultural fragmentations, following the turbulent 1960s? In his book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southerness, 1960–1980 (2018, UGA Press), Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies and southern history in an effort to answer that...

This time on Walter Edgar’s Journal, former SoCon commissioner John Iamarino, author of A Proud Athletic History: 100 Years of The Southern Conference (2021, Mercer University Press), tells the story of the notable athletes, coaches, and athletic programs that have built such a rich tradition over so many decades. Legendary sports figures such as Jerry West, Arnold Palmer, Bear Bryant, Sam Huff, a...

In 1780, Camden was the oldest and largest town in the Carolina backcountry. It was strategic to both the British Army and the Patriots in the Revolutionary War. Following a series of strategic errors before and during the Battle of Camden, the Patriot army under command of Major General Horatio Gates was soundly defeated, ushering in changes in military leadership that altered the war’s course. A...