Someone once said, “All roads lead to Rome.” Maybe...
But longtime historian, author, and radio host Walter Edgar believes it’s a safer bet that all roads pass through South Carolina. And lot of them start here.
On Walter Edgar’s Journal, he delves into the arts, culture, and history of South Carolina and the American South, to find out, among other things... the mysteries of okra, how many "Reconstructions" there have been since the Civil War, and why the road through the Supreme Court to civil rights has been so rocky.
Join Walter Edgar with co-host Alfred Turner and their guests the first and third Thursday of each month for Walter Edgar’s Journal. Listen to the episodes on this page, subscribe through the links below, listen in the SCETV App, or ask your smart speaker to "play Walter Edgar's Journal."
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The Creek War is one of the most tragic episodes in American history, leading to the greatest loss of Native American life on what is now U.S. soil.Peter Cozzens, author of A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South, tells us the story of the war that shaped the American South, and which would likely not have been won by the fledgling republic without Andrew Jackson’s unbridled ambition, cruelty, and fraught sense of honor and duty. -
In his book, The South Never Plays Itself, author, and film critic Ben Beard explores the history of the Deep South on screen, beginning with silent cinema and ending in the streaming era, from President Wilson to President Trump, from musical to comedy to horror to crime to melodrama. Opinionated, obsessive, sweeping, often combative, sometimes funny―a wild narrative tumble into culture both high and low―Beard attempts to answer the haunting question: what do movies know about the South that we don’t? -
Charleston, South Carolina’s John Martin Taylor is a culinary historian and cookbook author. His first book, Hoppin' John's Lowcountry Cooking, has been continuously in print for thirty years, and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Gastronomica.With the release of his latest book, Charleston to Phnom Penh - A Cook's Journal, he joins us for a conversation about his career, his travels, and, of course, food. -
In this episode Ben Zeigler and Stephen Motte from the Florence County Museum in Florence, SC, talk with us about the legend of Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion. The current exhibition at the museum, Legend: Francis Marion in the Pee Dee, examines the early decades of American Independence, when poets and painters turned General Francis Marion into a mythical figure; part fact, part folk legend. Those efforts were so effective that the cultural impact of their words and images lingers today. -
Acclaimed civil rights photographer Cecil Williams, founder of the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum talks with us this this time, along with Jannie Harriot, the museum’s Executive Director. Cecil began photographing the events and people of the Civil Rights era in the early 1950s and continued through the 1970s, eventually amassing nearly a million images. -
In his book, Revolutionary Roads: Searching for the War That Made America Independent...and All the Places It Could Have Gone Terribly Wrong (2022, Hachette), retired journalist Bob Thompson takes readers along, walking history-shaping battlefields of the American Revolution, from Georgia to Quebec; and hanging out with passionate lovers of revolutionary.In this episode of Walter Edgar’s Journal, Bob talks about one of his favorite battles in New England (Saratoga) and then explores some of the decisive battles that decided the outcome of the Revolution – battles that took place in the Carolinas. And he spotlights how the outcome a major South Carolina battle may have hinged on a tiny, fraught tipping point – a misunderstood order that could have altered the course of the war.
