Poland & Clark—The 50-50 Expeditions

50 Years of South Carolina in Images & Stories Robert Clark launched his photography career in 1974. Tom Poland moved to South Carolina in 1974 to write and teach. Poland and Clark met at South Carolina Wildlife magazine and their journey in words and images began. Their seminal feature, “Tenant Homes—Testament To Hard Times,” charted … Read more

George Washington’s 1791 Tour of the South: Where He Went and What He Drank

George Washington promised to visit every state in the new union during his presidency, and in the spring 1791 he set off from his Mount Vernon, Virginia home and traveled all the way to Savannah, Georgia and back. In researching his journey for her book “Methodists and Moonshiners,” Smith followed the president’s tour, investigating not … Read more

How Did the Simple Act of Spending a Night In a Slave Cabin Become a Book

Join author and journalist Herb Frazier for a conversation with historic preservationist Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project. Since May 2010, McGill has traveled to twenty-five states to sleep in more than 200 former slave dwellings to bring attention to a need to preserve these structures as important historic evidence of African … Read more

I Found the Source of My Gullah Memories in West Africa

Follow author and newspaper journalist Herb Frazier to three sites where captured West Africans were held before they were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to America. This forced migration of millions of Africans gave rise to Gullah Geechee culture along the coastal regions of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida.

Reconsidering James Petigru: Unionist and Civic Reformer in a Radical Age

Few sarcastic quips in all of southern history remain as famous as James Petigru’s reported comment upon receiving the news that South Carolina had seceded from the Union. South Carolina, Petigru mused sarcastically, was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” Petigru died in 1863, a devoted Unionist and southern … Read more

“A Soul of Priceless Value”: The Contested Ideology of Slaveholding in the Lowcountry

This lecture examines white Christianity’s struggle for influence among slaveholders in Charleston and the surrounding South Carolina Lowcountry as the movement delineated both the ideological and the practical mechanisms that it believed necessary to sustain a slaveholding society in the face of increasingly sharp moral and social criticism, chiefly from outside the region. Religious paternalism’s … Read more

Brethren of Spade & Pruning Knife: The Naturalists & the Carolinas

This presentation tells a story of international trade, natural history, and science from the days of exploration & colonization. This was a time of transfer, the movement of people, animals and plants; it is the Age of the Natural Historians who looked around the world and tried to understand what they saw. Carolina has an … Read more