SC History

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...

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...

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...

Credit SC Public Radio "H" is for H.L. Hunley . On the night of February 17, 1864, the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley attacked and sank the USS Housatonic about four miles off Sullivan’s Island. This was the first successful sinking of an enemy ship by submersible in the...

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...

Credit S.C. State 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...

As the newly appointed commander of the Southern Continental Army in December 1780, Nathanael Greene quickly realized victory would not only require defeating the British Army, but also subduing the region's brutal civil war. "The division among the people is much greater...

Roxana Robinson Credit Beowulf Sheehan/Post and Courier Books In Dawson’s Fall (2019, MacMillan), a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, the author tells a story of America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston...

Andrew Jackson returned to the Oval Office, so to speak, in 2017, when President Donald Trump hung the 7th President’s portrait there. Jackson remains one of the most studied and controversial figures in American history. Historian Charles Grier Sellers says, "Andrew...

For almost 30 years, Preservation South Carolina has been dedicated to preserving and protecting the historic and irreplaceable architectural heritage of South Carolina. Executive Director Michael Bedenbaugh and board member join Walter Edgar to talk about some of their...

The SC State Fair is celebrating 150 years and to celebrate the festivities historian and author Dr. Rodger Stroup is releasing a new book, called "Meet Me At The Rocket." Palmetto Scene sat down with him to discuss the vast history of the State Fair and some of the...

In his thoroughly researched and meticulously foot-noted publication, An Edgefield Planter and His World: The 1840s Journals of Whitfield Brooks (2019, Mercer University Press) Dr. James O. Farmer, Jr., opens a window on the life of an elite family and its circle in a now...

The Battle of Kings Mountain was a military engagement between Patriot and Loyalist militias during the Southern Campaign of the American Revolutionary War, resulting in a decisive victory for the Patriots. The battle took place on October 7, 1780, in what is now rural...

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...

"S" is for Spartanburg Methodist College. Spartanburg Methodist College is a four-year institution related to the United Methodist Church and located in western Spartanburg County. The college traces its roots to the Textile Industrial Institute (TII) founded in 1911 by...