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Every four years presidential hopefuls and the national media travel the primary election circuit through Iowa and New Hampshire. Once the dust settles in these states, the nation's focus turns to South Carolina, the first primary in the delegate-rich South. Historically Iowa and New Hampshire have dominated the news because they are first, not because of their predictive ability or representativeness. In First in the South: Why South Carolina's Presidential Primary Matters (2020, USC Press), H. Gibbs Knotts and Jordan M. Ragusa make the case for shifting the national focus to South Carolina because of its clarifying and often-predictive role in selecting presidential nominees for both the Republican and Democratic Parties.

Knotts and Ragusa talk with Walter Edgar about how they established the foundation for their claim, and then detail how South Carolina achieved its coveted "First in the South" status and examine the increasing importance of this primary since the first contest in 1980.

All Stations: Fri, Feb 21, 2020, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Feb 23, 4 pm

(Ovation)

This week on Walter Edgar's Journal, Mat Lee and Ted Lee drop in to talk about their new book, Hotbox: Inside Catering, the Food World’s Riskiest Business (2019, Henry Holt). In Hotbox, the Lee brothers take on the competitive, wild world of high-end catering, exposing the secrets of a food business few home cooks or restaurant chefs ever experience. Known for their modern take on Southern cooking, the Lee brothers steeped themselves in the catering business for four years, learning the culture from the inside-out. It’s a realm where you find eccentric characters, working in extreme conditions, who must produce magical events and instantly adapt when, for instance, the host’s toast runs a half-hour too long, a hail storm erupts, or a rolling rack of hundreds of ice cream desserts goes wheels-up.

All Stations: Fri, Feb 14, 2020, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Feb 16, 4 pm

From battlefields, boxcars, and forgotten warehouses to notorious prison camps like Andersonville and Elmira, prisoners seemed to be everywhere during the American Civil War. Yet there is much we do not know about the soldiers and civilians whose very lives were in the hands of their enemies. On this week’s Journal , Dr. Edgar talks with Dr. Evan Kutzler about Living by Inches (2019. UNC Press) , the first book to examine how imprisoned men in the Civil War perceived captivity through the basic

Black South Carolinians, despite poverty and discrimination, began to organize and lay the basis for the civil rights movement that would occur after World War II. Dr. Bobby Donaldson of the University of South Carolina talks about the efforts by black South Carolinians to obtain justice and civil rights during a time of economic collapse and political change. All Stations: Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Feb 02, 4 pm

(Gift of the artist; 1937.009.0027027. Courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art)

In the years after WWI, art, poetry, historic preservation, and literature flourished in Charleston, SC, and the Lowcountry during what has been called the Charleston Renaissance. Angela Mack, Executive Director & Chief Curator of the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, talks with Walter Edgar about the people and circumstances that came together to create this flowering of the beaux arts in the Holy City.

Mack and Edgar will also examine the obligations of museums to seek out the artistic voices of this period that were excluded from museum collections because of race or class, as well as how we must re-interpret art from this perod that represented African Americans and their lives as "lesser."

All Stations: Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jan 26, 4 pm

( Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information)

This week on Walter Edgar's Journal, our third program on South Carolina Between the World Wars, features Dr. Vernon Burton of Clemson University, in conversation with Walter Edgar about the politics of the period. During this time, State politics remained a politics very much based on friends and neighbors – white friends and neighbors, at least. Coming out of the relative progressivism of the First World War, politics took a swing back to conservativism which ran headlong into the federal programs and policies of the New Deal – polices which helped the state start digging out of the depression.  On the national scene, South Carolinians played major roles helping create and forward the strategies of the New Deal.

Dr. Vernon Burton, the Judge Matthew J. Perry Distinguished Chair of History at Clemson University, talks with Walter Edgar about the politics of the times and how they both changed, and, remained the same.

All Stations: Fri, Jan 17, 2020, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jan 19, 4 pm

When the stock market crashed in 1929, ushering in the Great Depression, South Carolina was already in dire financial straits. Cotton prices had plummeted, even before the boll weevil had decimated the crop. Years of non-sustainable practices in cotton farming had ruined thousands of acres of farmland. And, the textile industry had crashed. Then came Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which altered the physical, social, and economic landscape of South Carolina. In the second of our

Following World War I, South Carolina’s economy collapsed. The post-World-War-I drop in demand for textiles, the subsequent collapse in cotton prices, the exhaustion of farmland through poor farming practices, and the decimation of cotton crops by the boll weevil hit South Carolinians hard. Then came the stock market crash on Black Thursday in 1929 and the nation’s plunge into the Great Depression. People were starving, businesses were failing, farms were being repossessed, and sharecroppers

Since its founding in 1896, South Carolina State University has provided vocational, undergraduate, and graduate education for generations of African Americans. Now the state’s flagship historically black university, it achieved this recognition after decades of struggling against poverty, inadequate infrastructure and funding, and social and cultural isolation. In South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America , William C. Hine examines South Carolina State’s

(Victoria Hansen/SC Public Radio)

Four years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, a federal judge in Charleston hatched his secret plan to end segregation in America. Julius Waties Waring was perhaps the most unlikely civil rights hero in history. An eighth-generation Charlestonian, the son of a Confederate veteran and scion of a family of slave owners, Waring was appointed to the federal bench in the early days of World War II.

Faced with a growing demand for equal rights from black South Carolinians, and a determined and savvy NAACP attorney named Thurgood Marshall, Waring did what he thought was right: He followed the law, and the United States Constitution. In fact, he helped guide Marshall down a narrow legal path that led to the end of segregation schools.

Brian Hicks talks with Walter Edgar about Waring’s plan, and about his life, in the new book, In Darkest South Carolina: J. Waties Waring and the Secret Plan that Sparked a Civil Rights Movement (2017, Post and Courier Books).

- Originally broadcast 01/25/19 -

All Stations: Fri, Dec 20, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Dec 22, 4 pm