Remembering the Days: A USC Podcast

USC alumni and students have been singing the university alma mater for more than 110 years. But what, exactly, is an alma mater and how did USC end up with one?

For two centuries, social dances have been knitted into the fabric of the campus social scene at Carolina. Waltzes, the One-step, shag and hip-hop—the style of dance changes but the beat goes on. 

When The Gamecock student newspaper began publishing in 1908, there were only 300 students on campus to read it. Since then, the award-winning paper has published myriad stories about campus life and helped launch the careers of innumerable writers and journalists.

Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton engaged in an infamous duel in 1804, and a number of South Carolina College students nearly got tangled up in duels in the years before the Civil War. History records only one duel  involving South Carolina College students that ended in fatality — and this is the strange story of that tragedy. 

USC's South Carolina Honors College was born in the 1970s when several other of the nation's first honors colleges came into being. But rather than becoming an also-ran, USC's Honors College emerged as one of the nation's best by offering hundreds of unique honors courses across every academic discipline at the university.

Curtis Frye, head coach of field and track head at USC, knows a thing or two about coming in first place and being the first to do something. He's done all of those in his time at Carolina, including bringing home the university's first-ever national championship trophy. Perhaps most importantly, Coach Frye understands the importance of putting first things first. 

Every year, tens of thousands of prospective students and their families visit the University of South Carolina for a campus tour. Here's the story of how the university's Visitor Center came to be, as well as a peek behind the curtains at some unscripted moments in the lives of campus tour guides. 

“If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world … is a garden.” When Frances Hodgson Burnett penned those words more than a century ago in her classic children’s book The Secret Garden, there probably were very few, perhaps not any flower gardens on the University of South Carolina campus. But we’ve made up for it in the past 50 years or so. On this short tour, you'll learn the history of several not-so-secret gardens on campus and what's planted in each one. 

What building on the University of South Carolina campus was named for a Confederate navy commodore and commemorated on a picture postcard? It's a trick question! A high-rise residence hall was featured on a postcard in the late 1960s, and the caption on the postcard said the building was named in honor of alumnus Epaminondas J. Capstone. But how that came about is the real story!

Fifty years ago, it wasn't uncommon to hear professors give the 'look to your left, look to your right — one of you will have failed by the end of the semester' speech. But exactly 50 years ago, Carolina tried something different: a course designed to help freshmen feel like they belonged along with the academic tools they needed to succeed. It was called University 101, and it became model for hundreds of colleges across the country.