(Broadcast on SC Public Radio on December 12, 2025) – Today we are featuring a very special edition of the Journal, taken from a live broadcast on SC Public Radio on December 12. Sean Birch, Director of SCPR, will be your host, talking with Walter Edgar and Alfred Turner about the 25th anniversary of Walter Edgar’s Journal. The program features questions and comments from our radio audience and clips from past programs.

Today our guest is Mt. Pleasant native Grady Hendrix, author of the horror novel Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (2025, Berkley Books).  The novel is set in Florida in 1970 and is about a group of pregnant teenage girls, living in a maternity home for unwed girls, who discover a book on witchcraft. For the first time in their lives power seems to be in the hands.

We’ll talk with Grady about this latest book, as well as some of his past one, and explore how he came to specialize in the horror fiction genre.

This week we'll be talking with Dr. Jennifer Whitmer Taylor of Duquesne University about her book, Rebirth: Creating the Museum of the Reconstruction Era and the Future of the House Museum (2025, University of SC Press).

In Rebirth, Taylor provides a compelling account of how to reenvision the historic house museum. Using the Museum of the Reconstruction Era—known as the Woodrow Wilson Family Home for most of its many years as a house museum—as a case study, Taylor explores the challenges and possibilities that face public history practitioners and museum professionals who provide complex interpretations of contested public memory. Anchored by oral history interviews with docents who interact directly with the visiting public, Rebirth considers how a dated and seemingly outmoded venue for interpretation, the historic house museum, can be reimagined for twenty-first-century audiences. 

This week Walter will be talking with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about the American Revolution, focusing on the routing of the British and their allies by revolutionary Partisans during Cornwallis’ Southern campaign. 

Ken will also tell us a bit about his upcoming PBS documentary, The American Revolution. The six-part, 12-hour documentary series explores the country’s founding struggle and its eight-year War for Independence.

This much-anticipated series will premiere on Sunday, November 16, and will air for six consecutive nights, from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. on PBS and SCETV. The full series will be available to stream beginning Sunday, November 16 at PBS.org and on the PBS App. 

Today we’ll be switching things up a bit. Instead of Walter and Alfred interviewing a guest we will have a guest interviewing Walter.

The conversation is part of the Spring 2025 program put on by the University South Caroliniana Society: “E is for Edgar – Conversation and Barbeque with Walter.” Talking with Walter today is Beryl Dakers, president of the Society and long-time producer with SCETV.

In his book Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan Guy Gugliota offers a gripping story of the early years after the Civil War and the campaign led by President Ulysses S. Grant’s attorney general Amos T. Akerman to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Akerman, a former Georgia slaveholder and the only Southerner to serve in a Reconstruction cabinet, was the first federal lawman to propose using the Fourteenth Amendment to prosecute civil rights violations.

Gugliotta uses newspapers, documents, and first-person stories, including thousands of pages of testimony under oath taken by a Congressional joint committee tasked in 1871 to study the Ku Klux Klan, a breathtaking compilation of accounts by Ku Klux targets, their attackers, local and national politicians, public officials and private citizens. The result is a vivid portrait of the Reconstruction South through the career of this surprising man.

Guy joins us in conversation this week to talk about how Grant and Akerman took down the Klan.

This week we’ll be talking with Dr. Kathleen DuVal about native Americans in Colonial South Carolina.

Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as Kathleen will tell us, North American civilization did not come to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well-armed.

 Much of our discussion today is based on Kathleen DuVal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.
 
 

This fall we are celebrating 25 years of Walter Edgar’s Journal!

We thought that a good way to start that celebration would be to look back on the launch of our podcast. So, this week we bring you an encore of our final *broadcast* episode of May 2023.

Our guest was the Director of SC Public Radio, Sean Birch. We reminisced about the Journal’s beginnings and present highlights from our years on the air. And we talked about how morphing Walter Edgar’s Journal from a weekly broadcast into a semi-monthly podcast would allow us to focus more intently on our mission to explore South Carolina’s history and its culture.

This week we’ll be talking with Nic Butler, the historian at the Charleston County Public Library. He has been digging into archives both here and in Britain, researching the life of George Anson. 

Anson, was an officer in the British Navy who, by the time of his death in 1762, had risen to its highest rank, First Lord of the Admiralty. He had also spent 9 years in South Carolina during its time of transition from a colony governed by the Lords Proprietors to a colony of the British Crown.

That change wasn’t instant and some of the history the colony's governance during the transition - as well as that of day-to-day life – are sometimes unclear. However, in researching George Anson, Nic Butler has both found a valuable through-line to this history and shone a light on Anson’s own fascinating story.

This week we’ll be talking with Dr. Henry N. Tisdale, former president of Claflin University in Orangeburg, South Carolina. This Kingstree native has had a long and distinguished academic career, earning his undergraduate degree at Claflin in 1965 and, eventually, becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics from Dartmouth. His career path led him into college administration, and he became Claflin University’s president in 1994.

Claflin, like many historically black colleges and universities at the time, was struggling – facing declining enrollment and possible loss of accreditation. Henry Tisdale established the goal that Claflin would “enter the 21st century with an eye to become a premier liberal arts institution.” Thanks in large part to his leadership, Claflin was named the number one HBCU by Forbes magazine and was ranked in the top 4% of U.S. colleges and universities. 

Tisdale tells the story of Claflin’s renaissance in his book, Beyond the Western Wall: Audacious Transformation of a Small Liberal Arts College (2025, Cecil Williams Photography/Publishing).