Walter Edgar's Journal

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. In November of 2022, the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust announced a significant, historic discovery at the battlefield. The Trust, acting on behalf of Historic Camden Foundation, contracted with the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, to excavate a number of bodies of soldiers killed in the August 16, 1780 Battle of Camden. Artifacts from the burial sites are being studied; and the remains will be reintered with full, military honors, following ceremonies April 20-22, 2023, in Camden.

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 this week to tell the remarkable story of how she set out to keep that promise through her monthly, fundraising fish fries held at the church - and how word of her delicious, traditional foods spread the word about Soapstone Church around the world.

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 transformative chapter of American history.On this week’s episode of Walter Edgar’s Journal Dr. Edgar talks with Doug Bostick, Exec. Dir and CEO of the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust, and Catherine Noyes, Liberty Trail Program Director for the American Battlefield Trust.

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, historians, preservationists, tourism leaders, and more to create an engaging picture of this one place.McDaniel talks with Walter Edgar about the never-before-shared family moments, major decisions in preservation and site stewardship, and pioneering efforts to transform a Southern plantation into a site for racial conciliation.

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 workforce of gardeners and horticulturists – Black, white, enslaved, and free – have played in shaping this site for over 200 years.John Sherrer, Director of Cultural Resources for Historic Columbia, and Keith Mearns, Director of Grounds, talk with Walter Edgar about planning and building the Horticultural Center and about the ways it enriches the mansion’s grounds.

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 Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, Charleston author James M. Scott tells the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.”James Scott talks with Walter Edgar about the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first-time commanders deliberately targeted

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 were willing to help Confederate or Union forces, but the war took such a toll that all civilians, regardless of politics, began focusing on their own survival. Dr. Cashin talks about this history with Walter Edgar, and about the efforts of historians to establish a precedent for the study of material objects as a way to shed new light on the social, economic, and cultural history of the conflict.

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 been adapted as a streaming television series for Prime Video, with season one released in 2021. James Oliver Rigney Jr., whose pen name was Robert Jordan, was a native of Charleston, graduated from The Citadel with a degree in physics. He served two tours in Vietnam with the U.S. Army and received multiple decorations for his service. Michael Livingston’s book is a companion to Jordan’s internationally bestselling series and it delves into the creation of his masterpiece, drawing from interviews and an unprecedented examination of his unpublished notes.Michael Livingston joins Walter Edgar to talk about The Wheel of

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 they won the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, they would have advanced to the Little League World Series. But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible to play in the tournament because they had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, denying the boys their dream. This became a national story for a few weeks but then faded and disappeared altogether as Americans read of other civil rights stories, including the horrific killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till.Chris Lamb, author of The 1955 Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War (2022, University of Nebraska Press), and J

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 the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all three topics.Editors Vernon Burton and Peter Eisenstadt talk with Walter Edgar about the wide-ranging ideas explored in this volume.

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 Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver’s disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten and blinded while in custody.

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 during The American Revolution (2020, USC Press), James Waring McCrady and C. L. Bragg chronicle the banishment of these elite southerners, the hardships endured by their families, and the plight of the enslaved men and women who accompanied them, as well as the motives of their British captors.Bragg joins Walter Edgar to talk about this little known chapter of the Revolution.

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 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 interpretations of Southern history.

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 question.

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, and Steph Curry are all part of the Southern Conference's past.

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. After the battle, Major General Nathanael Greene was promoted to command of the Southern Campaign, and his leadership ultimately led to the evacuation of the British army from Charleston, SC in December 1782.In November of 2022, the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust announced a significant, historic discovery at the Revolutionary War Camden Battlefield. The Trust, acting on behalf of Historic Camden Foundation, contracted with the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, to excavate a number of bodies of Revolutionary War soldiers killed in the August 16, 178

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 practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood. They are archivists reminding us of what should survive.”Drew Lanham, the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, talks with Walter Edgar about his life, his work, his writing, and about what may lie hopes to achieve through his work.

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, complex, and large-scale tracts in South Carolina, Florida, and New Jersey through direct acquisitions.OSI’s Vice-President and Director of the Southeast, Maria Whitehead, joins Walter Edgar to talk about the acquisition and about the Institute’s plans for land protection in the state.

The signs are there: our coastal cities are increasingly susceptible to flooding as the climate changes. Charleston, South Carolina, is no exception, and is one of the American cities most vulnerable to rising sea levels. Lowcountry at High Tide: A History of Flooding, Drainage, and Reclamation in Charleston, South Carolina (USC Press, 2010) is the first book to deal with the topographic evolution of Charleston, its history of flooding from the seventeenth century to the present, and the efforts made to keep its populace high and dry, as well as safe and healthy.Author Christina Rae Butler talks with Walter Edgar about talk about Charleston’s topographic history and the challenges it faces in the 21st century.

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 they won the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, they would have advanced to the Little League World Series. But Little League officials ruled the team ineligible to play in the tournament because they had advanced by winning on forfeit and not on the field, denying the boys their dream. This became a national story for a few weeks but then faded and disappeared altogether as Americans read of other civil rights stories, including the horrific killing of 14-year-old Emmett Till.Chris Lamb, author of The 1955 Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars and Little League Baseball’s Civil War (2022, University of Nebraska Press), and J