Walter Edgar's Journal

After two decades of research and investigation, the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust, in collaboration with the South Carolina American Revolution Sestercentennial Commission (SC250), has unveiled the first volume of the Francis Marion Papers, a project that holds the potential to reshape our understanding of one of the American Revolution’s most heroic figures. The papers, consisti...

Few people beyond South Carolina’s Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston—Mother Emanuel—before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the church’s charismatic pastor and eight worshippers. In his book Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Ch...

This week we will be talking Scott Romine, author of The Zombie Memes of Dixie (2024, UGA Press) . The book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South . Approaching these propositions as memes Scott  argues that many of them developed in defense of slavery and evolved in its aftermath to continue to form a so...

This week we're going to explore South Carolina from A to Z. Walter and Alfred will take five topics from past episodes of our companion podcast, South Carolina from A to Z, and discuss each at length, giving these people and events from our state's history some room to "breathe." We'll tell you about the man who founded the earliest European settlement - 1562 - in what is now South Carolina. We'l...

This week we'll be talking with Timmonsville native Johnny D. Boggs about his latest novel, Bloody Newton: The Town from Hell (2024, Psicom Publishing), his journey from a childhood in the Pee Dee, his life in Santa Fe, New Mexico,and his career as a celebrated author of Western fiction. Bloody Newton has just won for Johnny his tenth Spur Award from The Western Writers of America.

This week we going to explore South Carolina from A to Z . That’s the title of our sister podcast and the title tells you all you need to know about what that podcast does: Letter by letter Walter goes through the South Carolina Encyclopedia, giving you bite-sized takes on the history of the Palmetto State. The challenge he faces for each episode is that it is only one minute long - 145 to 149 wor...

This week author and journalist Carolyn Click joins us to talk about her new book, The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot (2025, USC Press). Elmore's story is that of a man who believed, with uncommon boldness, that he and other Black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote. He volunteered to become the plaintiff in the NAACP lawsuit that successfully challenged the...

This week we'll be talking with Andrew Waters about his latest book, Backcountry War: The Rise of Francis Marion, Banastre Tarleton, and Thomas Sumter (2024, Westholme Publishing). In it Andrew weaves the history of three key leaders in the American Revolution into in a single narrative, focusing on the events of 1780 in South Carolina that witnessed their collective ascendance from common soldier...

This week, we’ll be talking with Bennett Parten, author of Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation (2025, Simon & Schuster). In Somewhere Toward Freedom , Ben reframes this seminal episode in Civil War history. He not only helps us understand how Sherman’s March impacted the war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it laid t...

This week, we’ll be talking with Betsy Teter and Jim Neighbors about their book, North of Main: Spartanburg's Historic Black Neighborhoods of North Dean Street, Gas Bottom, and Back of the College . In this book, co-authors Brenda Lee Pryce, Betsy Teter and Jim Neighbors tell the story of how post-emancipation black districts arose in Spartanburg and how they disappeared.  In this episode we will...

In his book, Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South , Evan Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity. Nooe join u...

This week we bring you a very special episode of the Journal – we will be remembering our friend and champion of Southern cuisine, Nathalie Dupree, who died on January 13, 2025, at the age of 85. Nathalie visited with us twice during the Journal’s long run as a broadcast program: once in 2011 to talk about her book, Southern Biscuits (2011, Gibbs-Smith) and again in 2013 when she published her gra...

In his new novel, Raptors in the Ricelands , Ron Daise unfolds a story in a twenty-first century fictional community near Georgetown, SC - a story which reveals family secrets and conflicts that challenge cultural beliefs. Conveyed in four acts and with chapter names that follow the production stages of Carolina Gold Rice, the novel spans the future, the present, and the past, and fosters a messag...

On this episode of Walter Edgar's Journal, we’ll be talking with Tracey Todd, the Director of Museums for the Historic Charleston Foundation, and Andrew Agha, an archaeologist working on the site of the Nathaniel Russell house, a National Historic Landmark on Meeting Street. We’ll be talking about the Foundation’s most recent preservation initiative which involves the kitchen house, an ancillary s...

This week we’ll be talking with former poet laureate of South Carolina, Marjory Wentworth about her new collection of poems entitled One River, One Boat (Evening Post Books, 2024). This collection of occasional poems and essays includes those written about heartbreaking and joyous times in South Carolina’s history and Wentworth’s own life including the deaths of relatives, gubernatorial inaugurati...

Dr. Kendra Hamilton’s book, Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess, is a literary and cultural history of a place: the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that’s one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the “cradle of Black culture” in the United States. While there is a veritable industry of books on literary Charleston and on “the lowcountry,” there has never b...

Abraham Lincoln, February 9, 1864(Anthony Berger / Library of Congress) This week, we offer you an encore of an episode from our broadcast archive: A fascinating conversation with Dr. Vernon Burton, the Judge Matthe w J. Perry Jr. Distinguished Professor of History at Clemson University, and Dr. Peter Eisenstadt, affiliate scholar in the Department of History at Clemson University. Walter will be...

"Where the Shrimp Pickers Live," 1940, oil on canvas.(Dusti Bongé (1903-93) / Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS. Gift of Dusti Bongé Art; Foundation, Inc. 1999.012 ) This week we will be talking with Jonathan Stuhlman and Martha Severens about their book, Southern/Modern: Rediscovering Southern Art from the First Half of the Twentieth Century (2024, UNC Press). Jonathan Stuhlman is the Senior...

Photomontage of members of the first South Carolina legislature following the Civil War.( Library of Congress) In their book, Reconstruction beyond 150: Reassessing the New Birth of Freedom, Vernon Burton and Brent Morris have brought together the best new scholarship, synthesizing social, political, economic, and cultural approaches to understanding a crucial period in our country’s history. They...

(Timothy J / Flickr ) This week, we will be talking with Dr. Judith Bainbridge about her book, A Short History of Greenville (2024, USC Press). The book is a concise and engaging history that traces Greenville, SC's development from backcountry settlement to one of America's best small cities In our conversation with Judith we will concentrate the growth Greenville's textile industry and its demis...

In his new book, The Miraculous Art of Jazz , Benjamin Franklin V, Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of South Carolina, has gathered reviews of hundreds of recordings written over his 40-year career as a jazz writer. In our conversation his love for jazz and blues shines through. And the reviews he has collected in his book are as vital and important as ever – for lis...

J. Drew Lanham, Ornithologist, Naturalist, and Writer, 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Clemson, SC( <i>John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation</i>) This week, we will be talking with J. Drew Lanham, about his new book, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves (2024, Hub City Press). The book is a sensuous collection of Drew's signature mix of poetry and prose, a lush journey into wildness and...

"Death of Major Ferguson at King's Mountain." (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library / The New York Public Library Digital Collections) This week on the Journal we will be talking with Alan Pell Crawford about his book, This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America's Revolutionary War in the South (2024, Alfred A. Kno...

"Ichnography of Charleston, South Carolina" (Library of Congress) For centuries residents of Charleston, SC, have made many attempts, both public and private, to manipulate the landscape of the low-lying peninsula on which Charleston sits, surrounded by wetlands, to maximize drainage, and thus buildable land and to facilitate sanitation. In her book, Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding,...

One of the Davis brothers who operated the Davis Battery Electric company in Greenville, 1930. <br/><br/><br/> (Courtesy of Bobbie Jean Rovner, Greenville) This week we will be talking with Diane Vecchio about her book, Peddlers, Merchants, and Manufacturers: How Jewish Entrepreneurs Built Economy and Community in Upcountry South Carolina (2024, USC Press). In the book, Diane exa...