Walter Edgar's Journal

In 1985, Mark Bryan heard Darius Rucker singing in a dorm shower at the University of South Carolina and asked him to form a band. For the next eight years, Hootie & the Blowfish—completed by bassist Dean Felber and drummer Soni Sonefeld—played every frat house, roadhouse, and rock club in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast, becoming one of the biggest independent acts in the region. In Only Wanna Be...

In her book, Baptists and Bootleggers: A Prohibition Expedition Through the South (2021, Evening Post Books) Kathryn Smith takes you to major cities and small towns, all of which struggled between the Baptists and their teetotaling allies who preached temperance and the bootleggers who got rich providing what their customers couldn’t buy legally. Smith talks with Walter Edgar about her Prohibition...

Timmonsville native Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, been bucked off horses, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives -- all in the name of finding a good story. He was won a record nine Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, a Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy a...

Shrimp, one of our most delicious food sources, was once only considered worthy of bait. In her new book, Shrimp Tales: Small Bites of History (2022, Primedia eLaunch), author Beverly Bowers Jennings tells the fascinating story of the shrimp industry, from the shrimp boats and their captains to fishing family lore, tasty recipes and more. Jennings talks with Walter Edgar about what she learned in...

Early in the twentieth century, for-profit companies such as Duke Power and South Carolina Electric and Gas brought electricity to populous cities and towns across South Carolina, while rural areas remained in the dark. It was not until the advent of publicly owned electric cooperatives in the 1930s that the South Carolina countryside was gradually introduced to the conveniences of life with elect...

“In the most barren inhospitable unhealthy part of North America, opposed by the most savage, inveterate perfidious cruel Enemy, with zeal and with Bayonets only, it was resolv’d to follow Green’s Army, to the end of the World.” So wrote British general Charles O’Hara about the epic confrontation between Nathanael Greene and Charles Cornwallis during the winter of 1780-81. Only Greene’s starving,...

In his book, The Grim Years: Settling South Carolina, 1670-1720 (2020, University of SC Press), Dr. John Navin explains how eight English aristocrats, the Lords Proprietors, came to possess the vast Carolina land grant and then enacted elaborate plans to recruit and control colonists as part of a grand moneymaking scheme. In his conversation with Walter Edgar, Navin tells of a cadre of men who ros...

The Open Space Institute’s mission is to protect scenic, natural, and historic landscapes to provide public enjoyment, conserve habitat and working lands, and sustain communities. Over the past 40 years, the institute has saved 2,285,092 acres of land through direct acquisition, grants, and loans. Having begun by focusing on land in New York State, they have in recent years saved significant, comp...

In 2020, Maj. General (Ret.) William F. Grimsley became South Carolina's first Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs. From the beginning, Grimsley and his staff have defined the purpose of the new Department of Veterans’ Affairs as leading and enabling “a state-wide coalition of partners to create and sustain an environment in which Veterans and their families can thrive as valued and contributing member...

For many years scholars made assumptions about how Europeans traded with West Africans for other, enslaved Africans, about how many voyages were made by slave ships to the English colonies in North America before 1808, and about why the institution of slavery almost died out in New England. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, a movement began that challenged these assumptions and the viewpoints...

In his new book, Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (2021, Simon and Schuster), Dr. Woody Holton gives a sweeping reassessment of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness accounts, Holton explores countless connect...

In his book, The Slow Undoing: The Federal Courts and the Long Struggle for Civil Rights in South Carolina, Dr. Stephen H. Lowe argues for a reconsideration of the role of the federal courts in the civil rights movement. It places the courts as a central battleground at the intersections of struggles over race, law, and civil rights. During the long civil rights movement, Black and White South Car...

Stephen Atkins Swails is a forgotten American hero. A free Black in the North before the Civil War began, Swails exhibited such exemplary service in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that he became the first African American commissioned as a combat officer in the United States military. After the war, Swails remained in South Carolina, where he held important positions in the Freedmen’s Bureau, hel...

Charles Duell inherited the historic properties Middleton Place and the Edmondston-Alston House, Charleston, SC, in 1969. He was 31 years old. A graduate of Yale, he had begun a career in finance on Wall Street. But the circumstances of his sudden inheritance compelled him to leave New York City and move his family to South Carolina. There he would take up the challenge of reviving the houses, gar...

River Alliance CEO Mike Dawson talks with Walter Edgar about how the Alliance has worked together with riverside communities, city and county governments, and many other organizations to create community resources along the Saluda, Broad, and Congaree rivers in the Midlands of South Carolina.

Timmonsville native Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, been bucked off horses, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives -- all in the name of finding a good story. He was won a record nine Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, a Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy a...

In her book, Baptists and Bootleggers: A Prohibition Expedition Through the South (2021, Evening Post Books) Kathryn Smith takes you to major cities and small towns, all of which struggled between the Baptists and their teetotaling allies who preached temperance and the bootleggers who got rich providing what their customers couldn’t buy legally. Smith talks with Walter Edgar about her Prohibition...

Few people are familiar with the full history that shaped and preserved the fish and wildlife of coastal South Carolina. From Native Americans to the early colonists to plantation owners and their slaves to market hunters and commercial fishermen, all viewed fish and wildlife as limitless. Through time, however, overharvesting led to population declines, and the public demanded conservation. The p...

In March of 2021, the South Carolina Battlefield Preservation Trust purchased 31 acres in Colleton County to preserve the site of a Revolutionary War victory by Francis Marion and his men over the British in what became known as the battle of Parker’s Ferry. The site will soon become part of the Liberty Trail, which will be a unified path of preservation and interpretation across South Carolina. T...

This week on Walter Edgar’s Journal we offer a conversation recorded before an audience, live as well as virtual, at the Charleston Literary Festival in November of 2021. Walter Edgar talks with Stuart Bennett about his novel, The Charleston Gambit (2021, Evening Post Books) - a rousing tale of Revolutionary War South Carolina. Along with the battles, it gives glimpses of Charleston fashion and so...

In his book, Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England (Osprey, 2021), Dr. Michael Livingston of The Citadel tells the story of the battle of Brunanburh and of an extraordinary effort, uniting enthusiasts, historians, archaeologists, linguists, and other researchers – amateurs and professionals, experienced and inexperienced alike – which may well have found the site of the long...

James Lundy's book, The History of the Poetry Society of South Carolina: 1920 to 2021, is a chronicle of the first 100 years of the oldest state poetry society in America, the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Founded in Charleston in 1920 by DuBose Heyward, John Bennett, Josephine Pinckney, Hervey Allen, and Laura Bragg, the Society's first 101 seasons run from the Jazz Age to the COVID era, wher...

The American South has experienced remarkable change over the past half century. Black voter registration has increased, the region’s politics have shifted, and in-migration has increased its population many fold. At the same time, many outward signs of regional distinctiveness have faded. But two professors of political science write that these changes have allowed for new types of Southern ident...

This fall Walter Edgar's Journal has been celebrating 21 years on the air by offering encore episodes from our vault. This week we bring you a special episode of The Journal with Walter and long-time Journal producer Alfred Turner as guests, and with SC Public Radio reporter Victoria Hansen guiding a discussion of the history of the program.

In 2021, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers celebrates the 150th anniversary of its founding. The Corps' Charleston District has a unique and varied program that grows larger every year. The Civil Works, Navigation, Regulatory, Emergency Management, Military, and Interagency and International Services programs serve a diverse group of customers that span not only South Carolina, but also globally, w...