--- All Stations: Fri, Aug 7, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Aug 9, 4 pm ---

(Originally Broadcast 02/06/15) - The topic on this week's Walter Edgar's Journal is Collecting--antiques, fine art, and decorative art. Southern art—and South Carolina art in particular—has become increasingly desirable to collectors as well as average art collectors in the last ten years. There is even a market for 20th century furniture and decorative items. But, with sea change in the auction business brought about by the World Wide Web, prices and desirability of certain objects can rise and fall drastically, in a short period of time.

Dr. Edgar is joined by two guests who can offer perspective on collecting; Ronald Long, President of Columbia’s Charlton Hall Gallery, and Callie Belser, a South Carolinian who is currently Associate Vice President, Specialist, 20th Century Decorative Arts and Design at Christie’s, NY.

  Charleston native Margaret Bradham Thornton is the editor of the highly praised Tennessee Williams’ Notebooks (2006, Yale Press), for which she received the C. Hugh Holman Prize for the best volume of southern literary scholarship, given by the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. Her latest work is the novel, Charleston (2014, Harper Collins), which Walter Isaacson calls a "lyrical tale [which] explores the emotional terrain of love, loss, and memory." She talks with Walter Edgar this week about her life growing up in Charleston, her career, and the vital role of literature in her life.

  --- All Stations: Fri, Jul 17, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jul 19, 4 pm ---

(Originally broadcast 01/16/15) ---  Bestselling author Ron Rash returns to Walter Edgar’s Journal to talk about his life and work. He’ll also tell Dr. Edgar about The Ron Rash Reader (USC Press, 2014), the 20th anniversary edition of The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth (USC Press, 2014) as well as his collection entitled Something Rich and Strange (Harper Collins, 2014).  And he’ll talk about co-writing the screenplay for the film Serena, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper, and based on Rash’s 2008 bestselling novel.

--- All stations: Fri, Jul 10, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jul 12, 4 pm ---

  The shooting deaths of nine members of Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in June shocked the nation. However, the history of “Mother Emanuel,” and, indeed, the black church in South Carolina, is one of repression and resistance, spiritual succor and political action, as well as education and aspiration. Dr. Bobby Donaldson of the University of South Carolina and Dr. Jon N. Hale of the College of Charleston talk with Walter Edgar about this history.

---All stations: Fri, Jul 3, 12 pm | News stations: Sun, Jul 5, 4 pm---

 (Originally broadcast 06/29/07) - -- For 24 years, Dan Huntley was a reporter/columnist for The Charlotte Observer. As a recipient of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan, he had the opportunity to travel and cook in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and the Greek Peloponnese. He soon realized that the Carolina pig pickings that he’s done since he was a teenager were part of a much larger food world. He then developed his own barbeque sauce, Carolina Pig Pucker, co-authored (with Lisa Grace Lednicer) a book, Extreme Barbecue, and started a catering business, Outdoor Feasts catering.

In this encore from 2007, Dan talks "contraption cooking" with Walter Edgar.

  There's a long history to the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., — affectionately known as "Mother Emanuel" — where nine churchgoers were allegedly shot and killed by 21-year-old Dylann Roof on Wednesday night. Part of that history involves Denmark Vesey, a West Indian slave, and later a freedman, who planned what would have been one of the largest slave rebellions in the United States had word of the plans not been leaked.

The revolt was to take place on Bastille Day, July 17, 1822, and was in reaction to the city of Charleston's suppression of the African Church, which boasted a membership of over three thousand in 1820. News of the plan leaked and Charleston authorities arrested the plot's leaders before the uprising could begin.

Dr. Bernard E. Powers, Jr., Professor of History and Director of African-American Studies at the College of Charleston, joins Dr. Edgar to talk about Denmark Vesey and why his name still has resonance today. (Originally broadcast 03/14/08)

  --- All Stations: Fri, Jun 19, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, Jun 21, 4 pm ---

This week on Walter Edgar's Journal, Dr. William Ferris, renowned folklorist and historian, tells the stories and history of The Storied South - Voices of Writers and Artists (UNC Press, 2013). The Storied South features the voices of twenty-six of the most luminous artists and thinkers in the American cultural firmament, from EudoraWelty, Pete Seeger, and Alice Walker to William Eggleston, Bobby Rush, and C. Vann Woodward. 

Masterfully drawn from one-on-one interviews conducted by renowned folklorist William Ferris over the past forty years, the book reveals how storytelling is viscerally tied to southern identity and how the work of these southern or southern-inspired creators has shaped the way Americans think and talk about the South.

Dr. Ferris, the Joel R. Williamson Eminent Professor of History and senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, joins Dr. Edgar to talk about the book. (Originally broadcast 11/15/13) 

      (Originally broadcast 10/30/12) - In his book, The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera, Dr. Harvey H. Jackson III traces the development of the Florida-Alabama coast as a tourist destination from the late 1920s and early 1930s, when it was sparsely populated with "small fishing villages," through to the tragic and devastating BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.

Jackson focuses on the stretch of coast from Mobile Bay and Gulf Shores, Alabama, east to Panama City, Florida—an area known as the "Redneck Riviera." Jackson explores the rise of this area as a vacation destination for the lower South's middle- and working-class families following World War II, the building boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the emergence of the Spring Break "season, and the severe hurricane destruction of the many small motels, cafes, bars, and early cottages that gave the small beach towns their essential character. 

Jackson traces the tensions surrounding the gentrification of the late 1980s and 1990s and the collapse of the housing market in 2008. While his major focus is on the social, cultural, and economic development, he also documents the environmental and financial impacts of natural disasters and the politics of beach access and dune and sea turtle protection.

  Greenville Chautauqua has been performing educational interactive historical theater continuously since 1999. The group's administrator, Caroline McIntyre is our guest, along with local historian Judy Bainbridge and presenter Leslie Goddard. They will talk about this year's program, America at the Movies. Presenters will portray Mary Pickford, Orson Welles, Gordon Parks, and Walt Disney.

The first Chautauqua, the New York State Assembly, was organized in 1874 by Methodist minister John Heyl Vincent and businessman Lewis Miller at a campsite on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in New York State as an outdoor adult education program for Sunday School teachers. In the outdoor setting on a lake resort the education program merged with family entertainment and recreation.

---All Stations: Fri, May 22, 12 pm | News Stations: Sun, May 24, 4 pm--- (Originally broadcast 01/10/14) - In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with low rent, a faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square became the center of a vibrant but short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane, were among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s (LSU Press, 2012) John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the jazz age.

Dr. John Shelton Reed is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was director of the Howard Odum Institute for Research in Social Science for twelve years and helped to found the university's Center for the Study of the American South and the quarterly Southern Cultures.