Walter Edgar's Journal

Walter Edgar's Journal

From books to barbecue, and current events to Colonial history, historian and author Walter Edgar delves into the arts, culture, and history of South Carolina and the American South. Produced by South Carolina Public Radio.

Episodes

Witness to change: George Anson and colonial Charleston

August 15, 2025 • 47 mins
This week we’ll be talking with Nic Butler, the historian at the Charleston County Public Library, who is researching the life of George Anson. Anson, was an officer in the British Navy who, by the time of his death in 1762, had risen to its highest rank, First Lord of the Admiralty. He had also spent 9 years in South Carolina during its time of transition from a colony governed by the Lords Proprietors to a colony of the British C...
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Beyond the western wall: Henry Tisdale and the transformation of Claflin University

August 1, 2025 • 46 mins
This week we're speaking with Dr. Henry N. Tisdale, former president of Claflin University in Orangeburg, SC. This Kingstree native has had a long and distinguished academic career, earning his undergraduate degree at Claflin in 1965 and, eventually, becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics from Dartmouth.
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SC A-Z - Back stories

July 18, 2025 • 34 mins
This week we are going to be exploring South Carolina from A to Z. That’s the title of our sister podcast from which we will select topics that deserve a longer look that just 60 seconds.This time out we'll discuss the ambitious man whose name adorns a Christmas decoration; the aristocratic Royal Governor who just didn't "get" South Carolina; the once powerful leadership body in the colony that lost it's standing almost overnight; ...
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The South never plays itself: The South on screen

July 4, 2025 • 42 mins
This week, we revisit our conversation with Ben Beard, author of The South Never Plays Itself: A Film Buff’s Journey Through the South on Screen.
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The Francis Marion papers: The legend, tactics and life of the Swamp Fox

June 20, 2025 • 49 mins
After two decades of research and investigation, the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust, in collaboration with the South Carolina American Revolution Sestercentennial Commission (SC250), has unveiled the first volume of the Francis Marion Papers, a project that holds the potential to reshape our understanding of one of the American Revolution’s most heroic figures.For this episode we sat down with Molly Fortune, CEO of ...
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Mother Emanuel: Two centuries of race, resistance, and forgiveness

June 6, 2025 • 64 mins
In his book Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (2025, Crown) Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack explores the inspiring history that brought the church to that moment, and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall.In this expanded episode of Walter Edgar's Journal, Sack joins us to explore the story of Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.
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The Zombie memes of Dixie

May 16, 2025 • 38 mins
This week we will be talking Scott Romine, author of The Zombie Memes of Dixie (2024, UGA Press). The book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South.Approaching these propositions as memes Scott argues that many of them developed in defense of slavery and evolved in its aftermath to continue to form a southern group whose “way of life” natura...
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Exploring "South Carolina from A to Z" - Ep. 2

May 2, 2025 • 28 mins
This week we're going to explore South Carolina from A to Z. Walter and Alfred will take five topics from past episodes of our companion podcast, South Carolina from A to Z, and discuss each at length, giving these people and events from our state's history some room to "breathe."We'll tell you about the man who founded the earliest European settlement - 1562 - in what is now South Carolina. We'll look at this history of a very imp...
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On the trail: Johnny D. Boggs' journey from the swamps of the Pee Dee to the Old West

April 18, 2025 • 36 mins
This week we'll be talking with Timmonsville native Johnny D. Boggs about his latest novel, Bloody Newton: The Town from Hell, his journey from a childhood in the Pee Dee, his life in Santa Fe, New Mexico,and his career as a celebrated author of Western fiction. Bloody Newton has just won for Johnny his tenth Spur Award from The Western Writers of America.
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Exploring "South Carolina from A to Z"

April 4, 2025 • 36 mins
This week we going to explore South Carolina from A to Z. That’s the title of our sister podcast and the title tells you all you need to know about what that podcast does: Letter by letter Walter goes through the South Carolina Encyclopedia, giving you bite-sized takes on the history of the Palmetto State. The challenge he faces for each episode is that it is only one minute long - 145 to 149 words of text to cover the topic.On tod...
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The cost of the vote - George Elmore and the battle for the ballot

March 21, 2025 • 35 mins
This week author and journalist Carolyn Click joins us to talk about her new book, The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot (2025, USC Press). Elmore's story is that of a man who believed, with uncommon boldness, that he and other Black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote. He volunteered to become the plaintiff in the NAACP lawsuit that successfully challenged the all-white Democratic primary in Sou...
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Backcountry war: The rise of Francis Marion, Banastre Tarleton, and Thomas Sumter in the American Revolution

March 7, 2025
This week we'll be talking with Andrew Waters about his latest book, Backcountry War: The Rise of Francis Marion, Banastre Tarleton, and Thomas Sumter (2024, Westholme Publishing). In it Andrew weaves the history of three key leaders in the American Revolution into in a single narrative, focusing on the events of 1780 in South Carolina that witnessed their collective ascendance from common soldiers to American legends. It was a tim...
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"Somewhere toward freedom" - Sherman's March and the story of America's largest Emancipation 

February 21, 2025
This week, we’ll be talking with Bennett Parten, author of Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation (2025, Simon & Schuster).In Somewhere Toward Freedom, Ben reframes this seminal episode in Civil War history. He not only helps us understand how Sherman’s March impacted the war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it laid the foundation for the fledging efforts of...
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North of Main: Spartanburg's historic Black neighborhoods

February 7, 2025 • 39 mins
This week, we’ll be talking with Betsy Teter and Jim Neighbors about their book, North of Main: Spartanburg's Historic Black Neighborhoods of North Dean Street, Gas Bottom, and Back of the College. In this book, co-authors Brenda Lee Pryce, Betsy Teter and Jim Neighbors tell the story of how post-emancipation black districts arose in Spartanburg and how they disappeared.
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Settler violence, native resistance, and the coalescence of the Old South

January 24, 2025 • 38 mins
In his book, Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South, Evan Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity.
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Remembering Nathalie Dupree

January 17, 2025 • 45 mins
This week we bring you a very special episode of the Journal – we will be remembering our friend and champion of Southern cuisine, Nathalie Dupree, who died on January 13, 2025, at the age of 85.
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Raptors in the riceland

January 3, 2025 • 32 mins
In his new novel, Raptors in the Ricelands, Ron Daise unfolds a story in a twenty-first century fictional community near Georgetown, SC - a story which reveals family secrets and conflicts that challenge cultural beliefs. Conveyed in four acts and with chapter names that follow the production stages of Carolina Gold Rice, the novel spans the future, the present, and the past, and fosters a message of connection with African diaspor...
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Charleston's Nathaniel Russell House: Kitchen house archaeology sheds new light on the life of the enslaved

December 20, 2024 • 45 mins
This time out we’ll be talking with Tracey Todd, the Director of Museums for the Historic Charleston Foundation, and Andrew Agha, an archaeologist working on the site of the Nathaniel Russell house, a National Historic Landmark on Meeting Street. We’ll be talking about the Foundation’s most recent preservation initiative which involves the kitchen house, an ancillary structure that included a kitchen, laundry, and living quarters f...
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Marjory Wentworth: One River, One Boat

December 6, 2024 • 33 mins
This week we’ll be talking with former poet laureate of South Carolina, Marjory Wentworth about her new collection of poems entitled One River, One Boat (Evening Post Books, 2024). This collection of occasional poems and essays includes those written about heartbreaking and joyous times in South Carolina’s history and Wentworth’s own life including the deaths of relatives, gubernatorial inaugurations, the Mother Emmanuel AME massac...
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Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess

November 15, 2024 • 40 mins
Dr. Kendra Hamilton’s book, Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess, is a literary and cultural history of a place: the Gullah Geechee Coast, a four-state area that’s one of only a handful of places that can truly be said to be the “cradle of Black culture” in the United States.
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