Walter Edgar's Journal show

Walter Edgar's Journal

Summary: From books to barbecue, and current events to Colonial history, historian and author Walter Edgar delves into the arts, culture, and history of South Carolina and the American South. Produced by South Carolina Public Radio.

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Podcasts:

 To the End of the World: Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

This week on Walter Edgar's Journal, author Daniel Waters talks with Walter Edgar about a compelling chapter of the American Revolution. Waters is author of the book, To the End of the World: Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan (2021, Westholme). “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.

 In Her Shoes: A History of the League of Women Voters of South Carolina | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

The League of Women Voters of South Carolina has a long and colorful history. Born out of the women's suffrage movement, the South Carolina League was organized in 1920, the year of the ratification of the 19th Amendment that ended a 72-year struggle for women’s right to vote. The League in South Carolina went dormant in the 1930s, only to revive in the late 1940s, with a state board in place in 1951, just in time for the struggle over desegregation of the public schools. Over the years, the

 The Beginnings of Black Activism in South Carolina | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

After World War I, Black South Carolinians, despite poverty and discrimination, began to organize and lay the basis for the civil rights movement that would occur after World War II. Dr. Bobby Donaldson of the University of South Carolina talks about the efforts by black South Carolinians to obtain justice and civil rights during a time of economic collapse and political change. - Originally broadcast 01/31/20 - News and Music Stations: Fri, Feb 26, 12 pm; Sat, Feb 27, 7 am News & Talk

 Judge J. Waties Waring and the Secret Plan that Sparked a Civil Rights Movement | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

Four years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, a federal judge in Charleston hatched his secret plan to end segregation in America. Julius Waties Waring was perhaps the most unlikely civil rights hero in history. An eighth-generation Charlestonian, the son of a Confederate veteran and scion of a family of slave owners, Waring was appointed to the federal bench in the early days of World War II. Faced with a growing demand for equal rights from black South

 Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

In her new book, Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (2020, USC Press), journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, cross burnings, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured—as well as the astonishing courage, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality.

 Charleston Patriots in Exile During the Revolution | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

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

 The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

“In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. I am, in the deepest sense, colored.” From these fertile soils—of love, land, identity, family, and race—emerges The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (2016, Milkweed Editions) a big-hearted, unforgettable memoir by ornithologist J. Drew Lanham. Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place , readers

 Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965 | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

In spite of a growing movement for journalistic neutrality in reporting the news of the 20th century, journalists enlisted on both sides of the mid-century struggle for civil rights. Indeed, against all odds, the seeds of social change found purchase in South Carolina with newspaperman John McCray and his allies at the Lighthouse and Informer, who challenged readers to "rebel and fight"--to reject the "slavery of thought and action" and become "progressive fighters" for equality.

 Uncompromising Activist: Richard Greener, First Black Professor at USC | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

Richard Theodore Greener (1844–1922) was a renowned black activist and scholar. The first black graduate of Harvard College, he became the first black faculty member at the University of South Carolina, during Reconstruction. He was even the first black US diplomat to a predominately-white country, serving in Vladivostok, Russia. A notable speaker and writer for racial equality, he also served as a dean of the Howard University School of Law and as the administrative head of the Ulysses S. Grant

 Pat Conroy: My Exaggerated Life | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

Pat Conroy’s memoirs and autobiographical novels contain a great deal about his life, but there is much he hasn’t revealed with readers until now. My Exaggerated Life (2018, University of South Carolina Press) is the product of a special collaboration between this great American author and oral biographer Katherine Clark, who recorded two hundred hours of conversations with Conroy before he passed away in 2016. In the spring and summer of 2014, the two spoke for an hour or more on the phone

 Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

In 2007, while researching mountain culture in upstate South Carolina, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall stumbled upon the small community of Liberia in the Blue Ridge foothills. There he met Mable Owens Clarke and her family, the remaining members of a small African American community still living on land obtained immediately after the Civil War. In his new book, Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community This intimate history tells the story of five generations of the

 The Journey of Catholicism in South Carolina | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3112

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Diocese of Charleston by Pope Pius VII. This makes it the seventh oldest Roman Catholic diocese in the United States. At that time, the diocese comprised the states of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In spite of a ban on Catholicism in the Colonial era, it arrived in Carolina much earlier than 1820 via both colonists and enslaved persons.

 Daniel Morgan: a Revolutionary Life | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

On January 17, 1781, at Cowpens, South Carolina, the notorious British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton and his legion were destroyed along with the cream of Lord Cornwallis’s troops. The man who planned and executed this stunning American victory was Daniel Morgan. Once a barely literate backcountry laborer, Morgan now stood at the pinnacle of American martial success.

 The South of the Mind | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

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.

 The Life and Times of General Andrew Pickens: Revolutionary War Hero, American Founder | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 3113

In his book, The Life and Times of General Andrew Pickens: Revolutionary War Hero, American Founder (2017, UNC Press), Dr. Rod Andrew, Jr., of Clemson University, explores the life of the hard-fighting South Carolina militia commander of the American Revolution, was the hero of many victories against British and Loyalist forces. In this book, Andrew offers an authoritative and comprehensive biography of Pickens the man, the general, the planter, and the diplomat. Andrew vividly depicts Pickens

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