Walter Edgar's Journal

Early in the twentieth century, for-profit companies such as Duke Power and South Carolina Electric and Gas brought electricity to populous cities and towns across South Carolina, while rural areas remained in the dark. It was not until the advent of publicly owned electric cooperatives in the 1930s that the South Carolina countryside was gradually introduced to the conveniences of life with electricity. Today, electric cooperatives serve more than a quarter of South Carolina's citizens and more than seventy percent of the state's land area.In his book, Empowering Communities: How Electric Cooperatives Transformed Rural South Carolina (USC Press, 2022), Dr. Lacy K. Ford and co-author Jared Bailey tell the story of the rise of "public" power – electricity serviced by member-owned cooperatives and sanctioned by federal and state legislation. It is a complicated saga, encompassing politics, law, finance, and rural economic development, of how the cooperatives helped bring fundamental and transformational change

“In the most barren inhospitable unhealthy part of North America, opposed by the most savage, inveterate perfidious cruel Enemy, with zeal and with Bayonets only, it was resolv’d to follow Green’s Army, to the end of the World.” So wrote British general Charles O’Hara about the epic confrontation between Nathanael Greene and Charles Cornwallis during the winter of 1780-81. Only Greene’s starving, threadbare Continentals stood between Cornwallis and control of the South—and a possible end to the American rebellion.This week on Walter Edgar's Journal, author Andrew Waters talks with Walter Edgar about a compelling chapter of the American Revolution. Waters is author of the book, To the End of the World: Nathanael Greene, Charles Cornwallis, and the Race to the Dan (2021, Westholme).

In his book, The Grim Years: Settling South Carolina, 1670-1720 (2020, University of SC Press), Dr. John Navin explains how eight English aristocrats, the Lords Proprietors, came to possess the vast Carolina land grant and then enacted elaborate plans to recruit and control colonists as part of a grand moneymaking scheme. In his conversation with Walter Edgar, Navin tells of a cadre of men who rose to political and economic prominence, while ordinary colonists, enslaved Africans, and indigenous groups became trapped in a web of violence and oppression.Threatened by the Native Americans they exploited, by the Africans they enslaved, and by their French and Spanish rivals, white South Carolinians lived in continual fear. For some it was the price they paid for financial success. But for most there were no riches, and the possibility of a sudden, violent death was overshadowed by the misery of their day-to-day existence.

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 2022, 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.

In 2020, Maj. General (Ret.) William F. Grimsley became South Carolina's first Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs. From the beginning, Grimsley and his staff have defined the purpose of the new Department of Veterans’ Affairs as leading and enabling “a state-wide coalition of partners to create and sustain an environment in which Veterans and their families can thrive as valued and contributing members of the South Carolina community and the Nation.”Grimsley talks with Walter Edgar about how the Department strives to achieve that purpose and the way it is expanding and building partnerships to do so.

For many years scholars made assumptions about how Europeans traded with West Africans for other, enslaved Africans, about how many voyages were made by slave ships to the English colonies in North America before 1808, and about why the institution of slavery almost died out in New England. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, a movement began that challenged these assumptions and the viewpoints of generations of Euro-centric scholars began to give way to work by data-driven historians.Dr. Donald Wright, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York College at Cortland, is one of the historians who was part of this sea change in scholarship. He spent decades writing about African history, beginning as graduate student collecting oral histories in Gambia, as well as African American history, and Atlantic history. His books include Oral Traditions from the Gambia and African Americans in the Colonial Era: From African Origins Through the American Revolution.This week Walter Edga

In his new book, Liberty is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution (2021, Simon and Schuster), Dr. Woody Holton gives a sweeping reassessment of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters.Using more than a thousand eyewitness accounts, Holton explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers.Woody Holton joins Walter Edgar to talk about this “hidden history.”

In his book, The Slow Undoing: The Federal Courts and the Long Struggle for Civil Rights in South Carolina, Dr. Stephen H. Lowe argues for a reconsideration of the role of the federal courts in the civil rights movement. It places the courts as a central battleground at the intersections of struggles over race, law, and civil rights. During the long civil rights movement, Black and White South Carolinians used the courts as a venue to contest the meanings of the constitution, justice, equality, and citizenship.Lowe joins Walter Edgar to discuss how African Americans used courts and direct action in tandem to bring down legal segregation throughout the long civil rights era.

Stephen Atkins Swails is a forgotten American hero. A free Black in the North before the Civil War began, Swails exhibited such exemplary service in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry that he became the first African American commissioned as a combat officer in the United States military. After the war, Swails remained in South Carolina, where he held important positions in the Freedmen’s Bureau, helped draft a progressive state constitution, served in the state senate, and secured legislation benefiting newly liberated Black citizens. Swails remained active in South Carolina politics after Reconstruction until violent Redeemers drove him from the state.Gordon C. Rhea tells Swails' story in his new biography, Stephen A. Swails: Black Freedom Fighter in the Civil War and Reconstruction (2021, LSU Press. Rhea talks with Walter Edgar about the saga of this indomitable human being who confronted deep-seated racial prejudice in various institutions but nevertheless reached significant milestones in the fight for raci

Charles Duell inherited the historic properties Middleton Place and the Edmondston-Alston House, Charleston, SC, in 1969. He was 31 years old.A graduate of Yale, he had begun a career in finance on Wall Street. But the circumstances of his sudden inheritance compelled him to leave New York City and move his family to South Carolina. There he would take up the challenge of reviving the houses, gardens, and forestlands of his forebears. He convinced countless relatives, friends, and associates to work with him. Virginia Beach, author of American Landmark: Charles Duell and the Rebirth of Middleton Place, and Tracey Todd, President and CEO of Middleton Place Foundation, talk with Walter Edgar about Duel’s decision to preserve the family seat of his ancestors, and the journey toward its sustainability.

River Alliance CEO Mike Dawson talks with Walter Edgar about how the Alliance has worked together with riverside communities, city and county governments, and many other organizations to create community resources along the Saluda, Broad, and Congaree rivers in the Midlands of South Carolina.

Timmonsville native Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, been bucked off horses, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives -- all in the name of finding a good story. He was won a record nine Spur Awards from Western Writers of America, a Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, and has been called by Booklist magazine "among the best western writers at work today."He joins Walter Edgar to talk about his career, his love of the American West, and about his new book, The Cobbler of Spanish Fort and Other Frontier Stories (2022, Five Star Publishing).

In her book, Baptists and Bootleggers: A Prohibition Expedition Through the South (2021, Evening Post Books) Kathryn Smith takes you to major cities and small towns, all of which struggled between the Baptists and their teetotaling allies who preached temperance and the bootleggers who got rich providing what their customers couldn’t buy legally.Smith talks with Walter Edgar about her Prohibition expedition through hotels, bars, speakeasies, museums and cemeteries, and shares some vintage cocktail recipes she picked up along the way.

Few people are familiar with the full history that shaped and preserved the fish and wildlife of coastal South Carolina. From Native Americans to the early colonists to plantation owners and their slaves to market hunters and commercial fishermen, all viewed fish and wildlife as limitless. Through time, however, overharvesting led to population declines, and the public demanded conservation. The process that produced fish and game laws, wardens and wildlife refuges was complex and often involved conflict, but synergy and cooperation ultimately produced one of the most extensive conservation systems on the East Coast. Author James O. Luken presents this fascinating story in his new book, Coastal South Carolina Fish and Game: History, Culture and Conservation.

In March of 2021, the South Carolina Battlefield Preservation Trust purchased 31 acres in Colleton County to preserve the site of a Revolutionary War victory by Francis Marion and his men over the British in what became known as the battle of Parker’s Ferry. The site will soon become part of the Liberty Trail, which will be a unified path of preservation and interpretation across South Carolina. The Trail will tell the story of the events of 1779-1782 in the Carolinas, which directly led to an American victory in the war.Charles Baxley of the SC Battlefield Trust and archaeologist Steve Smith join Walter Edgar to talk about efforts to find the historical boundaries of the site, purchase the land, and establish the Liberty Trail.

This week on Walter Edgar’s Journal we offer a conversation recorded before an audience, live as well as virtual, at the Charleston Literary Festival in November of 2021. Walter Edgar talks with Stuart Bennett about his novel, The Charleston Gambit (2021, Evening Post Books) - a rousing tale of Revolutionary War South Carolina. Along with the battles, it gives glimpses of Charleston fashion and society, faces head-on issues of slavery and plantation life, and tells an engaging love story.Dr. Edgar and the author talk about Bennett's love of history, the novel's main characters, and the attitudes and personalities on both sides of the conflict that helped turn the American Revolution into a brutal civil war.

In his book, Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England (Osprey, 2021), Dr. Michael Livingston of The Citadel tells the story of the battle of Brunanburh and of an extraordinary effort, uniting enthusiasts, historians, archaeologists, linguists, and other researchers – amateurs and professionals, experienced and inexperienced alike – which may well have found the site of the long-lost battle of Brunanburh, over a thousand years after its bloodied fields witnessed history. This week on Walter Edgar's Journal, he talks about the battle, the efforts to find its true location, and why it was as existential a conflict for England as the Battle of Britain, some 1000 years later.The story: Late in AD 937, four armies met in a place called Brunanburh. On one side stood the shield-wall of the expanding kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. On the other side stood a remarkable alliance of rival kings - at least two from across the sea - who'd come together to destroy them once and for all. The stakes were no l

James Lundy's book, The History of the Poetry Society of South Carolina: 1920 to 2021, is a chronicle of the first 100 years of the oldest state poetry society in America, the Poetry Society of South Carolina. Founded in Charleston in 1920 by DuBose Heyward, John Bennett, Josephine Pinckney, Hervey Allen, and Laura Bragg, the Society's first 101 seasons run from the Jazz Age to the COVID era, where everyone from Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins, Sherwood Anderson, Jericho Brown, Thornton Wilder, Robert Pinsky, and hundreds of others appeared before the membership.Talking with Walter Edgar, Lundy, also currently the Society's president, gives us an insider's view, with insights into the inner workings and disfunctions of the organization and its slow progress from a Whites-only organization of the segregated South founded in the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu Pandemic, through the Roaring Twenties, into the darkness of

In 2021, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers celebrates the 150th anniversary of its founding. The Corps' Charleston District has a unique and varied program that grows larger every year. The Civil Works, Navigation, Regulatory, Emergency Management, Military, and Interagency and International Services programs serve a diverse group of customers that span not only South Carolina, but also globally, which keeps the staff of more than 240 quite busy.Lt Colonel Andrew Johannes, Charleston District Commander; and Brian Williams, the District’s Civil Works Chief, join Walter Edgar for a conversation on the Corps’ history, its missions, and the many ways its work impacts South Carolina, including the deepening of Charleston Harbor.

As part of our continuing celebration of Walter Edgar’s Journal at 21 we present an encore broadcast from May of 2009.Internationally renowned Southern literature scholars Trudier Harris, University Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Alabama, and the late Noel Polk, formerly of Mississippi State University, join Dr. Edgar to debate the question “What was the most influential Southern novel of the 20th century?” This episode is a companion of the SCETV’s Take on the South: What was the most influential Southern novel of the 20th century? That was originally broadcast on Wednesday, May 13, 2009. Take on the South is a series of eight, one-hour, live-to-tape debates produced by SCETV for the University of South Carolina's Institute for Southern Studies (ISS) under a grant provided by Watson-Brown Foundation, Inc. You can watch this program, on demand, at knowitall.org.