Walter Edgar's Journal

---All Stations: Fri, May 22, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, May 24, 4 pm--- (Originally broadcast 01/10/14) - In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with low rent, a faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square became the center of a vibrant but short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Sprat...

(iStock) ----All Stations: Fri, May 15, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, May 18, 4 pm----   Nowhere do Americans more intimately connect to sports than in their hometowns.  Six South Carolina communities, in cooperation with The Humanities Council SC, will celebrate this connection as they host Hometown Teams: How Sports Shape America , a traveling exhibition from the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Stree...

(Mississippi State University) --- All Stations: Fri, Apr 10, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Apr 12, 4 pm ---   In his book,  Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order  (Free Press, 1992) John F. Marszalek presents general William Tecumseh Sherman as a complicated man who, fearing anarchy, searched for the order that he hoped would make his life a success. Dr. Marszalek talks with Dr. Edgar about Sherma...

(Steve Exum) - All Stations: Fri, Apr 3, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Apr 5, 4 pm -   Dr. Heather Andrea Williams of Pennsylvania State University joins Dr. Walter Edgar for another "Conversation on the Civil War, 1865." The subject: emancipation and freedom. Williams is one of the world’s leading historians of the experience of slavery in the 19th century. Her award-winning first book,  Self-Taugh...

- All Stations: Fri, Mar 27, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Mar 29, 4 pm -   Charleston’s Middleton Place was established early in the life of the Carolina colony and served as a base of operations for a great Low Country planter family and was home to a dynamic African-American slave community. Charles Duell, President of the Middleton Place Foundation, and Tracey Todd, Vice President of Museums for...

(Louisiana State University)   The University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Humanities and Institute for Southern Studies concludes its series Conversations on the Civil War with a look back to 1865, the end of the war, the beginning of freedom for thousands of slaves, and the period of Reconstruction in the South. The second guest in this series of conversations, recorded before an audi...

  (Note: this program was originally scheduled  for 02/20/15)   The University of South Carolina’s College of Arts and Humanities and Institute for Southern Studies concludes its series Conversations on the Civil War with a look back to 1865, the end of the war, the beginning of freedom for thousands of slaves, and the period of Reconstruction in the South. The first guest in this series of conver...

Please Note: Conversations on the Civil War with guest Robert Brinkmeyer has been resheduled for next week.   (Originally broadcast 05/30/14) - South Carolina’s Lt. Governor shoots to death the Editor of the state’s largest newspaper, in broad daylight, in downtown Columbia. Sounds like a plot point in a novel? Well, it actually happened, in the early 20 th century, and James Lowell Underwood tell...

- All Stations: Fri, Feb 13, 12:00 pm | News Stations: Sun, Feb 15, 4:00 pm - Walter Edgar’s Journal   listeners have a front row seat for a public “Conversation about the South,” held in March of 2014 by the American History Book Club and Forum at the Upcountry History Museum – Furman University, in Greenville, SC. Long-time friends and colleagues, Professor James Cobb, who holds the B. Phinizy S...

(Courtesy of Good Catch)   Bryan Tayara and Dr. John Mark Dean share a passion for sustainable, locally caught seafood. Tayara is owner of  Our Local Catch , and Dr. Dean is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Science and Ocean Policy with the  University of South Carolina's Marine Science Program . They talk with Dr. Edgar about the state of South Carolina’s crabbers, fishermen, shrimpers, and...

(University of South Carolina) Dr. Mark M. Smith, of the University of South Carolina, returns to The Journal to talk about his book The Smell of Battle, the Taste of Siege: A Sensory History of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2014). No other book has looked at the Civil War through the prism of the five senses, or considered their impact on various groups of indviduals. Smith is widely co...

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 entitled Something Rich and Strange (Harper Collins, 2014).  And he’ll talk about co-writing the screenplay for the upco...

(Washington Times)   With the passing of former South Carolina Governor James B. Edwards, on December 26, 2014, Walter Edgar's Journal offers an encore of a conversation between Dr. Edgar and the Governor, which first aired in October of 2004. Edwards was the first Republican Governor elected since Reconstruction.  Walter talks with him about his time in office…both on the state and federal levels...

-Walter Edgar's Journal-    Greenville's downtown is widely recognized as one of the best in America. In Reimagining Greenville: Building the Best Downtown in America (The History Press, 2013), authors John Boyanoski and Mayor Knox White tell the story of the careful, deliberate efforts by city and community leaders who banded together to build something special from a decaying city center. Mayor...

  Novelist Sharyn McCrumb talks with Dr. Edgar about her new book  Nora Bonesteel’s Christmas Past  (2014, Abingdon Press) When someone buys the old Honeycutt house, Nora Bonesteel is glad to see some life brought back to the old mansion, even if it is by summer people. But when the new owners decide to stay in their summer home through Christmas, they find more than old memories in the walls.  No...

  A product of the industrialized New South,  Eugene Healan Thomason  (1895–1972) made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York to advance his art education and launch his career. Like so many other aspiring American artists, he understood that the city offered unparalleled personal and professional opportunities for a promising young painter in the early 1920s. Thomason returned to the South in the...

  In 1954, the U. S. Supreme Court made it's landmark ruling to end segregation in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. Fifty years on, Dr. Jon N. Hale, of the College of Charleston, and Dr. Millicent E. Brown, of Claflin University, join Dr. Edgar to talk about the road to school desegregation and civil rights in South Carolina. - All Stations: Friday, Nov 28, 12 pm | News s...

Rep. James Clyburn drops by to talk with Walter Edgar about his life and career, and about writing his autobiography,  Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black.   - All Stations: Fri, Nov 21, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Nov 23, 4 pm -

A city that has nearly five million visitors a year definitely needs a tourism management plan. And Charleston, SC, has one, which has been revised several times since its creation in 1978. Now, it's time to craft a totally new plan, and Historic Charleston Foundation's Katharine Robinson has been tasked with leading the committee responsible. She talks with Walter Edgar about the challenges and o...

(UNESCO UK) - All Stations: Fri, Oct 31, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Nov 2, 2014 - The Magna Carta is a charter of liberties to which the English barons forced King John to give his assent in June 1215 at Runnymede in June of 1215. It is also considered by many to be a cornerstone of human rights to which the U. S. Constitution's Bill of Rights can trace its ancestry. Join Dr. Edgar to talk about...

(Travis Dove) Deb Richardson-Moore, a middle-aged suburban mom and journalist was inspired to become a pastor after writing a story exploring God’s call in our lives. Seven years ago, a recent graduate of Erskine Theological Seminary, she took a position as pastor of the non-denominational Triune Mercy Center, an inner-city mission to the homeless in Greenville, S.C. “What I found there absolutely...

(Courtesy of the author)     In  The Hurricane Sisters  (2014, Harper Collins), Dorothea Benton Frank again takes us deep into the heart of her magical South Carolina Lowcountry on a tumultuous journey filled with longings, disappointments, and, finally, a road toward happiness that is hard earned. There we meet three generations of women buried in secrets. The determined matriarch, Maisie Pringle...

All Stations: Fri, Oct 3, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Oct 5, 4 pm  Dr. Charles H. Lippy, the LeRoy A. Martin distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and author of Religion in South Carolina will be giving a lecture in October at Ebenezer Lutheran Church, Columbia, on How the Civil War Transformed Religion in South Carolina . He stops by o...

 (Originally broadcast 04/18/14) - In his 2013 memoir,  The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and his Son ,   author Pat Conroy admits that his father, Don, is the basis of abusive fighter pilot he created for the title role of his novel,  The Great Santini , and that his mother, Peg, and his brothers and sisters have all served as models for characters in  The Prince of Tides  and his other...

(Originally broadcast 04/04/14) - Pat Conroy, author of  The Water is Wide ,  The Great Santini ,  The Prince of Tides ,  The Death of  Santini, joins Dr. Walter Edgar for an event celebrating the author’s life;  his work; and  One Book, One Columbia ’s 2014 selection,  My Reading Life  (Nan A. Talese, 2010). The conversation was recorded before an audience of over 2000, at Columbia’s Township Aud...