In this week's episode of Walter Edgar's Journal, Richard Gergel details the impact of the 1946 blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard on both President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring, and traces their influential roles in changing the course of America's civil rights history.Woodard, a returning, decorated African American veteran of World War II, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver’s disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten and blinded while in custody.

(N.Y. Public Library (public domain); Artist: Chapin, John Reuben (1823-1894))

In the months following the May 1780 capture of Charleston, South Carolina, by combined British and loyalist forces, British soldiers arrested sixty-three paroled American prisoners and transported them to the borderland town of St. Augustine, East Florida—territory under British control since the French and Indian War.

In their new book, Patriots in Exile: Charleston Rebels in St. Augustine during The American Revolution (2020, USC Press), James Waring McCrady and C. L. Bragg chronicle the banishment of these elite southerners, the hardships endured by their families, and the plight of the enslaved men and women who accompanied them, as well as the motives of their British captors. Bragg joins Walter Edgar to talk about this little known chapter of the Revolution.

- Originally broadcast 11/20/20 -

News and Music Stations: Fri, Jan 20, 12 pm; Sat, Jan 21, 7 am
News & Talk Stations: Fri, Jan 20, 12 pm; Sun, Jan 22, 4 pm

C. Vann Woodward( UNC Press)

With an epic career that spanned two-thirds of the twentieth century, C. Vann Woodward (1908–1999) was a historian of singular importance. A brilliant writer, his work captivated both academic and public audiences. He also figured prominently in the major intellectual conflicts between left and right during the last half of the twentieth century. Woodward's vision still permeates our understandings of the American South and of the history of race relations in the United States.

In his fresh and revealing biography, C. Vann Woodward: America's Historian (2022, UNC Press), James Cobb shows, explores how Woodward displayed a rare genius and enthusiasm for crafting lessons from the past that seemed directly applicable to the concerns of the present—a practice that more than once cast doubt on his scholarship. Dr. Cobb talks with Walter Edgar about Woodward and the changing interpretations of Southern history.

01/09/23

In his new book, Carolina's Lost Colony: Stuarts Town and the Struggle for Survival in Early South Carolina (2022, USC Press), historian Peter N. Moore examines the dual colonization of Port Royal at the end of the seventeenth century. From the east came Scottish Covenanters, who established the small outpost of Stuarts Town. Meanwhile, the Yamasee arrived from the south and west. These European and Indigenous colonizers made common cause as they sought to rival the English settlement of Charles Town to the north and the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine to the south. Also present were smaller Indigenous communities that had long populated the Atlantic sea islands. It is a global story whose particulars played out along a small piece of the Carolina coast.However, as Moore tells Walter Edgar, religious idealism and commercial realities came to a head as the Scottish settlers made informal alliances with the Yamasee and helped to reinvigorate the Indian slave trade—setting in motion a series of events that transformed the region into a powder keg of colonial ambitions, unleashing a chain of hostilities, realignments, displacement, and destruction that forever altered the region.

(Virginia State Parks [CC BY 2.0] via Flickr)

How did conceptions of a tradition-bound, "timeless" South shape Americans' views of themselves and their society's political and cultural fragmentations, following the turbulent 1960s? In his book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southerness, 1960–1980 (2018, UGA Press), Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies and southern history in an effort to answer that question. 

Wide-ranging chapters detail the iconography of the white South during the civil rights movement; hippies' fascination with white southern life; the Masculine South of George Wallace, Walking Tall, and Deliverance; the differing southern rock stylings of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd; and the healing southerners of Jimmy Carter. The South of the Mind demonstrates that we cannot hope to understand recent U.S. history without exploring how people have conceived the South, as well as what those conceptualizations have omitted.

-(Originally released 07/19/19) - 

How did conceptions of a tradition-bound, "timeless" South shape Americans' views of themselves and their society's political and cultural fragmentations, following the turbulent 1960s? In his book, The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southerness, 1960–1980 (2018, UGA Press), Zachary J. Lechner bridges the fields of southern studies and southern history in an effort to answer that question.

Duke University football coach Wallace Wade at practice in the 1930s. Duke was a member of the Southern Conference from 1928 to 1953.(Duke University Archives / Flickr)

In the winter of 1921, fifteen prominent colleges and universities met in Atlanta, Georgia, to form a new organization to promote intercollegiate athletics competition. That organization, soon to become known as the Southern Conference (SoCon), remains a strong and viable member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) 100 years later. Southern Conference roots may be found throughout college athletics from the Mid-Atlantic region to the deep South. All but three of the current Southeastern Conference (SEC) members once belonged to the Southern Conference. Likewise, a majority of present Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) institutions formerly were SoCon members.

This time on Walter Edgar’s Journal, former SoCon commissioner John Iamarino, author of A Proud Athletic History: 100 Years of The Southern Conference (2021, Mercer University Press), tells the story of the notable athletes, coaches, and athletic programs that have built such a rich tradition over so many decades. Legendary sports figures such as Jerry West, Arnold Palmer, Bear Bryant, Sam Huff, and Steph Curry are all part of the Southern Conference's past.

- Originally released 04/23/21 -

"Battle of Camden - death of De Kalb"( The New York Public Library Digital Collections / The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library)

In 1780, Camden was the oldest and largest town in the Carolina backcountry. It was strategic to both the British Army and the Patriots in the Revolutionary War. Following a series of strategic errors before and during the Battle of Camden, the Patriot army under command of Major General Horatio Gates was soundly defeated, ushering in changes in military leadership that altered the war’s course. After the battle, Major General Nathanael Greene was promoted to command of the Southern Campaign, and his leadership ultimately led to the evacuation of the British army from Charleston, SC in December 1782.

In November of 2022, the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust announced a significant, historic discovery at the Revolutionary War Camden Battlefield. The Trust, acting on behalf of Historic Camden Foundation, contracted with the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, to excavate a number of bodies of Revolutionary War soldiers killed in the August 16, 1780 Battle of Camden.

Walter Edgar talks with Dr. Steve Smith of the SC Institute for Archeology and Anthropology at USC; Bill Stevens, forensic anthropologist with the Richland County Coroner’s Office; and Doug Bostick, CEO of the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust about the excavations, the significance of the discoveries, and about plans for reinterment ceremonies April 20-22, 2023, in Camden.

Joseph Drew Lanham, onrnithologist, naturalist, and writer, and now a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, in Clemson, S.C.(John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation)

Edgefield native Drew Lanham wasn’t entirely sure what the phone call from Chicago was about. And, after he heard what the person on the phone had to say, he wasn’t altogether sure he believed the news: Drew had just won a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant.”

The MacArthur Foundation says that “The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood. They are archivists reminding us of what should survive.”

Drew Lanham, the Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, talks with Walter Edgar about his life, his work, his writing, and about what may lie hopes to achieve through his work.

The Black River at Kingstree, SC(Robin M. Keith / Wikimedia Commons)

(Originally broadcast 04/22/22) - The Open Space Institute’s mission is to protect scenic, natural, and historic landscapes to provide public enjoyment, conserve habitat and working lands, and sustain communities. Over the past 40 years, the institute has saved 2,285,092 acres of land through direct acquisition, grants, and loans. Having begun by focusing on land in New York State, they have in recent years saved significant, complex, and large-scale tracts in South Carolina, Florida, and New Jersey through direct acquisitions.

In December 2021, the Open Space Institute (OSI) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) announced the purchase of three properties along the Santee River in South Carolina, expanding the largest contiguous block of protected coastal lands in the state.

OSI’s Vice-President and Director of the Southeast, Maria Whitehead, joins Walter Edgar to talk about the acquisition and about the Institute’s plans for land protection in the state.

News and Music Stations: Fri, Dec 02, at 12 pm; Sat, Dec 03, at 7 am
News & Talk Stations: Friday, Dec 02, at 12 pm; Sun, Dec 04, at 4 pm