Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson (University of South Carolina Press, 2025), Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique literary voice. Following a biographical introduction, Hayes examines the different roles Thompson played throughout his literary career, resulting in a view of his work unlike any previously published biographical or critical study. The ensuing chapters analyze Thompson's work in his capacities as a foreign correspondent, literary critic, New Journalist, gonzo journalist, campaign writer, anthologist, letter writer, and novelist. Hayes draws on previously unrecorded articles, correspondence, and interviews to inform his insightful analysis. Written in an engaging and propulsive style, Understanding Hunter S. Thompson is essential reading for scholars and fans.

Kevin J. Hayes is professor emeritus of English, University of Central Oklahoma.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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In Stories of Struggle: The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2020), longtime journalist Claudia Smith Brinson details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured―as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality.

Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins. Participants' use of nonviolent direct action altered the landscape of civil rights in South Carolina and reverberated throughout the South.

These firsthand accounts include those of the unsung petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton's Briggs v. Elliot, a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision; the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter; and the black female employees and leaders who defied a governor and his armed troops during the 1969 hospital strike in Charleston.

Brinson also highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Thomas W. Gaither, Congress of Racial Equality field secretary and scout for the Freedom Rides; Charles F. McDew, a South Carolina State College student and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers' strike.

These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians' often violent resistance to change. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress―and hope for the future. For more information on this book, see storiesofstruggle.com

Matt Simmons is an Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel University where he teaches course in U.S. and public history. His research interests focus on the intersection of labor and race in the twentieth-century American South. You can follow him on X @matthewfsimmons.

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Since its founding in 1801, African Americans have played an integral, if too often overlooked, role in the history of the University of South Carolina. Robert Greene and Tyler D. Parry's edited volume Invisible No More: The African American Experience at the University of South Carolina (U South Carolina Press, 2021) seeks to recover that historical legacy and reveal the many ways that African Americans have shaped the development of the university. The essays in this volume span the full sweep of the university's history, from the era of slavery to Reconstruction, Civil Rights to Black Power and Black Lives Matter. This collection represents the most comprehensive examination of the long history and complex relationship between African Americans and the university.

Like the broader history of South Carolina, the history of African Americans at the University of South Carolina is about more than their mere existence at the institution. It is about how they molded the university into something greater than the sum of its parts. Throughout the university's history, Black students, faculty, and staff have pressured for greater equity and inclusion. At various times they did so with the support of white allies, other times in the face of massive resistance; oftentimes, there were both.

Between 1868 and 1877, the brief but extraordinary period of Reconstruction, the University of South Carolina became the only state-supported university in the former Confederacy to open its doors to students of all races. This "first desegregation," which offered a glimpse of what was possible, was dismantled and followed by nearly a century during which African American students were once again excluded from the campus. In 1963, the "second desegregation" ended that long era of exclusion but was just the beginning of a new period of activism, one that continues today. Though African Americans have become increasingly visible on campus, the goal of equity and inclusion—a greater acceptance of African American students and a true appreciation of their experiences and contributions—remains incomplete. Invisible No More represents another contribution to this long struggle.

A foreword is provided by Valinda W. Littlefield, associate professor of history and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Henrie Monteith Treadwell, research professor of community health and preventative medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine and one of the three African American students who desegregated the university in 1963, provides an afterword.

Adam McNeil is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Beginning with the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948 and extending through the 2020 election cycle, political scientists M.V. Hood III and Seth C. McKee trace the process by which rural white southerners transformed from fiercely loyal Democrats to stalwart Republicans. While these rural white southerners were the slowest to affiliate with the Grand Old Party, they are now its staunchest supporters. This transition and the reasons for it are vital to understanding the current electoral landscape of the American South, including states like Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, all of which have the potential to exert enormous influence over national electoral outcomes.

In Rural Republican Realignment in the Modern South: The Untold Story (U South Carolina Press, 2022), Hood and McKee examine their changing political behavior, arguing that their Democratic-to-Republican transition is both more recent and more durable than most political observers realize. By analyzing data collected from their own region-wide polling along with a variety of other carefully mined sources, the authors explain why the initial appeal of 1950s Republicanism to upscale white southerners in metropolitan settings took well over a half-century to yield to, and morph into, its culturally conservative variant now championed by rural residents. Hood and McKee contend that it is impossible to understand current American electoral politics without understanding the longer trajectory of voting behavior in rural America and they offer not only a framework but also the data necessary for doing so.

Brandon T. Jett, professor of history at Florida SouthWestern State College, creator of the Lynching in LaBelle Digital History Project, and author of Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2021) and co-editor of Steeped in a Culture of Violence: Murder, Racial Injustice, and Other Violent Crimes in Texas, 1965–2020 (Texas A&M University Press, scheduled Spring 2023). Twitter: @DrBrandonJett1.

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Though typically considered oral cultures, ancient Greece and Rome also boasted textual cultures, enabled by efforts to perfect, publish, and preserve both new and old writing. In Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics (University of South Carolina Press, 2018) Michele Kennerly argues that such efforts were commonly articulated through the extended metaphor of the body. They were also supported by people on whom writers relied for various kinds of assistance and necessitated by lively debates about what sort of words should be put out and remain in public. 

Spanning ancient Athenian, Alexandrian, and Roman textual cultures, Kennerly shows that orators and poets attributed public value to their seemingly inward-turning compositional labors. After establishing certain key terms of writing and editing from classical Athens through late republican Rome, Kennerly focuses on works from specific orators and poets writing in Latin in the first century B.C.E. and the first century C.E.: Cicero, Horace, Ovid, Quintilian, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. The result is a rich and original history of rhetoric that reveals the emergence and endurance of vocabularies, habits, and preferences that sustained ancient textual cultures. This major contribution to rhetorical studies unsettles longstanding assumptions about rhetoric and poetics of this era by means of generative readings of both well-known and understudied texts.

Lee M. Pierce (she/they) is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Geneseo specializing in rhetoric, race, and U.S. political culture. They also host the Media & Communications and Language channels for New Books Network and their own podcast titled RhetoricLee Speaking.

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Southern Food Historian Rebecca Sharpless discusses a new edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking released in 2021 by University of South Carolina Press. Sharpless added a new critical introduction to the historic cookbook, first published in 1930 from a New York press as a collaboration between Blanche Rhett, Helen Woodward, and Lettie Gay. Woodward had married into a family with South Carolina ties and for a time rented a home that shared a courtyard with Rhett. As Woodward tells the story, she wanted to send some recipes back to her Northern connections, and Rhett suggested she write a book of recipes instead. Gay tested the recipes in a New York kitchen, standardizing measurements and translating them to a wider audience.

Sharpless immediately foregrounds the Northern sensibility that informs the rhetorical situation of the book. Published just a few years before Gone With the Wind, the cookbook represented a version of Charleston’s sumptuous antebellum past to an audience with an appetite for consuming moonlight and magnolias.

Sharpless’s 2021 introduction asks the question, “What do readers today need to know to put the book in context?” Sharpless uses most of the limited space of the foreword acknowledging the uncredited contributors to the cookbook and offering more information about those named in the book. Sharpless is especially – and rightly – critical of the ways that Two Hundred Years erases the contributions of enslaved people, and when it does offer credit, it is usually demeaning and patronizing in its depictions of African American domestic cooks as “magical” and unscientific. Sharpless reminds today’s readers that “It is a book of white nostalgia, not black.” And the final words of the foreword could not be any clearer: “Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking stands as a double monument: to the rich foodways of the Lowcountry and the efforts of White Charlestonians to put a pretty face on White Supremacy.” With this caveat, Sharpless does acknowledge some extraordinary women from Charleston’s elite classes who make significant contributions to the book and have remarkable stories of their own, still waiting to be told.

Sharpless encourages 21st century readers to use the cookbook in their own kitchens; the instructions and ingredients are as accessible today as they would have been in 1930. However, she cautions readers to read the nostalgic textual interludes between recipes with skepticism, and to maintain an attitude of respect for the enslaved and anonymous contributors who made Low Country cuisine into the hot cultural commodity it is today.

Rebecca Sharpless is professor of history at Texas Christian University. She is author of Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms and Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Her newest book, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South, is forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press in Spring 2022.

Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society.

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The smoke was thick, the music was loud, and the beer was flowing. In the fast-and-loose 1980s, Jackson Station Rhythm & Blues Club in Hodges, South Carolina, was a festive late-night roadhouse filled with people from all walks of life who gathered to listen to the live music of high-energy performers. Housed in a Reconstruction-era railway station, the blues club embraced local Southern culture and brought a cosmopolitan vibe to the South Carolina backcountry.

Over the years, Jackson Station became known as one of the most iconic blues bars in the South. It offered an exciting venue for local and traveling musical artists, including Widespread Panic, the Swimming Pool Qs, Bob Margolin, Tinsley Ellis, and R&B legend Nappy Brown, who loved to keep playing long after sunrise.

The good times ground to a terrifying halt in the early morning hours of April 7, 1990. A brutal attack—an apparent hate crime—on the owner Gerald Jackson forever altered the lives of all involved.

In this fast-paced narrative, Live At Jackson Station: Music, Community, and Tragedy in a Southern Blues Bar (U South Carolina Press, 2021)emerges as a cultural kaleidoscope that served as an oasis of tolerance and diversity in a time and place that often suffered from undercurrents of bigotry and violence—an uneasy coexistence of incongruent forces that have long permeated southern life and culture.

Daniel M. Harrison earned a BA in Social Sciences from New College of the University of South Florida and MS and PhD degrees from Florida State University. He is currently Professor of Sociology at Lander University. He lives in Greenwood, SC, with his wife, artist Rebecca Salter Harrison, their two daughters, three dogs and two cats.

Harrison's other work has appeared in journals such as Media, Culture, and Society, Sexualities and Current Perspectives in Social Theory.

Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL: MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi). A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin

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Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority—and linked the Americas together.

In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas (U of South Carolina Press, 2020), John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives in freedom for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World's most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the low country of North America's Atlantic coast. Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free people of color improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority.

Built upon research conducted on three continents, this book takes a comparative approach to understanding the contours of black freedom in the Americas. It reveals in new detail the creative and persistent attempts of free black people to improve their lives and that of their families. It examines how various paths to freedom, responses to the Haitian Revolution, opportunities to engage in skilled labor, involvement with social institutions, and the role of the church all helped shape the lived experience of free people of color in the Atlantic World.

As free people of color worked to improve their individual circumstances, staking claims to rights, privileges, and distinctions not typically afforded to those of African descent, they engaged with white elites and state authorities in ways that challenged prevailing racial attitudes. While whites across the Americas shared common doubts about the ability of African-descended people to survive in freedom or contribute meaningfully to society, free black people in Cartagena, Charleston, and beyond conducted themselves in ways that exposed cracks in the foundations of American racial hierarchies. Their actions represented early contributions to the long fight for recognition, civil rights, and racial justice that continues today.

Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Professors Melissa Walker of Converse College and Giselle Roberts of Australia’s La Trobe University, editors of the Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South series, discuss the field of documentary editing and how the personal writings of southern women reveal the broader history of life in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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Microhistories are an important method of investigating an historical moment with a fine-grain focus that can puncture holes in the generalizations that historians sometimes make. In her new book, Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louis Rebecca McCord (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), Candace L. Bailey uses a close reading of the music owned and performed by three prominent women in antebellum Charleston to demonstrate the varied experiences and perspectives of figures who also had much in common. All three women were sophisticated, well-traveled, and moved in the highest social circles of the planter class in Charleston. Yet, each woman had unique educational backgrounds, upbringings, and musical choices. They all experienced the Civil War and its aftermath quite differently. Rather than confining herself simply to an analysis of the musical repertoire each woman owned, Bailey examines the scores with the attention often reserved for Medieval manuscripts to discern the implications of the publishers, source of the scores, and the handwritten markings left by her subjects as they learned the music. She thoroughly contextualizes the collections within the time period, the milieu of upper-class Southern women, the history of Charleston, and, most importantly, the lives of the three women as evidenced by other documents they and those in their circle left behind. In doing so, Bailey reminds us that we must balance studying sweeping historical trends with the lived experiences of individuals.

Candace Bailey is a Professor of Music at North Carolina Central University. She began her career studying seventeenth-century British keyboard music, but in the last decade has devoted much of her research time to the role of music among middle- and upper-class women in the Southern United States during the nineteenth century. Charleston Belles Abroad is her third book, and she has published articles in many journals including the Journal for the Society for American Music, Music & Letters, and the Journal for Musicological Research. In 2015, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Award for Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She will be a Fellow of the National Humanities Center for the 2019–2020 academic year.

Kristen M. Turner, Ph.D. is a lecturer at North Carolina State University in the music department. Her work centers on American musical culture at the turn of the twentieth century and has been published in several journals and essay collections.

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