Walter Edgar's Journal

(White House photo by Eric Draper via Wikimedia Commons)   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 . The first is a discussion  between two internationally-renowned Southern-literature scholars: Dr. Trudier Harris of UNC and Dr. Noel Polk of Mis...

(North Carolina State Archives) ​In his book,  C arolina 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...

(iStock)   Earlier this year, 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, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History for the University of South Carolina Beaufort,...

(SC Public Radio) Dr. Susan Cutter knows about disasters.   She is director of the University of South Carolina’s Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute , and she has studied disaster preparedness, response. She has also headed teams that were on the ground after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 and after hurricane Katrina flooded much of New Orleans and the Gulf Co...

  75% of all enslaved Africans coming to America came in through the ports of Charleston, Beaufort and Georgetown, South Carolina. The result of this mingling of slaves from West Africa with the plantation culture awaiting them in America became Gullah; the genesis and taproot of African American culture. The PBS special, Circle Unbroken – A Gullah Journey from Africa to America , portrays the his...

(independentmail.com)      Journey Proud (Abe Books, 2013) is the story of four white children growing up in the early 1960s in a middle-class neighborhood in Columbia, South Carolina. This coming-of-age tale set in the South during the civil rights movement exposes the inequities of the period and shows how childhood innocence is often replaced by harsh realities. Walter Edgar talks with author S...

  The Voting Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in August of1965. This landmark legislation aimed to eliminate obstacles created by state and local governments to keep African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution. Walter Edgar talks with University of South Carolina historians Bobby Donaldson and Patricia Sullivan...

  Charleston surgeon Richard Hagerty began painting before medical school honed his eye and hand coordination. He is a self taught artist who draws his surreal, fantastical imagery from dreams, mythology, history, science and stories. He works in a variety of media, including pen and ink, watercolor and oil. Hagerty and art curator Roberta Sokolitz talk with Walter Edgar about his art, his career,...

 In September of 2014, the Violence Policy Center ranked South Carolina second in nation in rate of women killed by men. Their report was release just weeks after Charleston's The Post and Courier newspaper ran a three-week series on criminal domestic violence called “ Till Death Do Us Part ," which later won the Pulitzer Prize. Jennifer Hawes was part of The Post & Courier team that reported...

(iStock)   Several miles outside of Moncks Corner is, arguably, the most significant extant Revolutionary War site in South Carolina. Fair Lawn Plantation’s Revolutionary War significance stems from historic battles, events, famous people, geographic location, and landscape architecture. Near Stony Landing on Biggin Creek, the fortified Colleton house and separate redoubt fort played a substantial...

( Courtesy Post & Courier)  The late  Ken Burger ’s A Sporting Life (Evening Post Books, 2015) is a collection of his best and most requested columns from his legendary career as a sports writer for the Charleston Post & Courier. At the end of each piece is a post script - updating the reader about the person or event. This book resonates with Southerners, who recognize and relate to the l...

  This week's special Pledge Edition of Walter Edgar's Journal features an encore of segments from Walter's January 16th conversation with South Carolina author Ron Rash . -- All Stations: Fri, Oct 2, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Oct 4, 4 pm --

(Alfred Stieglitz [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)   In 1915, Georgia O'Keeffe radically redefined herself as an artist. Rejecting all she had done before, she found her voice with a series of black and white charcoal drawings she collectively titled, Specials. Her great Charleston friend, Anita Pollitzer, took these drawings, unbeknownst to the artist, and showed them to Alfred Stieglitz (...

    Since the early 1960s the Confederate battle flag had been flying at the South Carolina State House--at first, on the Capitol dome; then, as the result of an NAACP boycott of businesses in the state, it was moved to the Confederate Soldiers monument. On July 10, 2015, as a result of growing public pressure following the shooting deaths of the pastor and eight parishioners of Emanuel A. M. E. C...

  South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal is retiring at the end of 2015. First elected to the court in 1988, Toal has served as its chief since 2000. This week on Walter Edgar's Journal , Toal joins Dr, Edgar to talk about her career and about the changes she has helped bring to South Carolina’s court systems. And she gives a preview of her upcoming James Otis Lecture, September 18th...

(iStock)   Walter Edgar welcomes two old friends to Walter Edgar's Journal  this week, Dorothea Benton Frank and Mary Alice Monroe. Monroe talks about her new novel, The Summer’s End (Gallery/Simon & Schuster, 2015), the final installment her Lowcountry Summer trilogy of books. In All the Single Ladies (Harper Collins, 2015), Dorothea Benton Frank again takes us deep into the Lowcountry of Sou...

  --- All Stations: Fri, Aug 7, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Aug 9, 4 pm --- (Originally Broadcast 02/06/15) - The topic on this week's  Walter Edgar's Journal   is Collecting--antiques, fine art, and decorative art. Southern art—and South Carolina art in particular—has become increasingly desirable to collectors as well as average art collectors in the last ten years. There is even a market for 20...

(Louise Fields)   Charleston native Margaret Bradham Thornton is the editor of the highly praised   Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks  (2006, Yale Press), for which she received the C. Hugh Holman Prize for the best volume of southern literary scholarship, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Her latest work is the novel,  Charleston  (2014, Harper Collins), which Walter Isaacson...

  --- All Stations: Fri, Jul 17, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jul 19, 4 pm --- (Originally broadcast 01/16/15) ---  Bestselling author Ron Rash returns to Walter Edgar’s Journal to talk about his life and work. He’ll also tell Dr. Edgar about  The Ron Rash Reader   (USC Press, 2014), the 20th anniversary edition of  The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth  (USC Press, 2014) as well as his collection...

(Linda O'Bryon) --- All stations: Fri, Jul 10, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jul 12, 4 pm ---   The shooting deaths of nine members of Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in June shocked the nation. However, the history of “Mother Emanuel,” and, indeed, the black church in South Carolina, is one of repression and resistance, spiritual succor and political action, as well as education and aspiration....

(Facebook) ---All stations: Fri, Jul 3, 12 pm | News stations: Sun, Jul 5, 4 pm---  (Originally broadcast 06/29/07) - -- For 24 years, Dan Huntley was a reporter/columnist for The Charlotte Observer. As a recipient of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, he had the opportunity to travel and cook in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and the Greek Peloponnese. He soon realized that the...

(Courtesy National Park Service)   There's a long history to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., — affectionately known as "Mother Emanuel" — where nine churchgoers were allegedly shot and killed by 21-year-old Dylann Roof on Wednesday night. Part of that history involves Denmark Vesey, a West Indian slave, and later a freedman, who planned what would have been one...

(University of North Carolina Press)   --- All Stations: Fri, Jun 19, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jun 21, 4 pm --- This week on Walter Edgar's Journal,  Dr. William Ferris, renowned folklorist and historian, tells the stories and history of  The Storied South - Voices of Writers and Artists (UNC Press, 2013). The Storied South features the voices of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thin...

(University of Georgia Press)       (Originally broadcast 10/30/12) - In his book,  The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera ,  Dr. Harvey H. Jackson III traces the development of the Florida-Alabama coast as a tourist destination from the late 1920s and early 1930s, when it was sparsely populated with "small fishing villages," through to the tragic and devastating BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spil...

(Greenville Chautauqua)    Greenville Chautauqua has been performing educational interactive historical theater continuously since 1999. The group's administrator, Caroline McIntyre is our guest, along with local historian Judy Bainbridge and presenter Leslie Goddard. They will talk about this year's program, America at the Movies. Presenters will portray Mary Pickford, Orson Welles, Gordon Parks,...