South Carolina has more than 50 symbols and songs that represent the rich history and resources of our state. The state flag with its palmetto and crescent is the best-known symbol. But through the years, others have been added including the Carolina Wren, milk and tea, collards, the Carolina wolf spider, blue granite, sweetgrass basket … Read more
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
NEW TOPIC! In 1923, on the last day in this two-story wooden school, people packed the house for the school play. In the third act, an oil lantern fell to the floor. Everything caught fire. Relatives threw children out windows, slid others down outer walls. The seventy-seven souls who perished—only thirteen recognizable—were laid to rest in … Read more
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
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
Higher Education must prepare our students to face an increasingly complex, diverse, and changing world. We must educate the citizens of tomorrow–and we must do it today. I recall once reading the quote: “To be faithful to our mission, to be creative, we must change.” This was not the wisdom of a Silicon Valley CEO … Read more
Despite the significant increase in South Carolina’s per capita income over the decades since 1940 (and those gains were real and generated a more vigorous consumer economy), the Palmetto state’s standing among states remained in the bottom ten of among fifty. In 2021, despite the state’s aggressive and sustained development efforts, SC ranked 43th in per … Read more
Americans stand in a very peculiar relationship to their history. We are fond of evoking it with pride – as the inspiring story of the “City on the Hill,” or the “last best hope for democracy,” and as the “leader of the free world,” and so on. We Americans are also readily inspired by our … Read more
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
