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Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority—and linked the Americas together. In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas (2020, USC Press), John Garrison Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free people of color improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority.

“M” is for Maham, Hezekiah (1739-1789)

After almost four years of investigations, recriminations, hearings and debate following the V-C Summer nuclear debacle, both the South Carolina House and Senate have now passed bills to bring major reform to state owned utility Santee Cooper.

On the first episode of ColaJazz Presents, we spotlight the Columbia, SC, ensemble Les Flat Out Strangers. The group specializes in gypsy swing, a European-tinged sound featuring popular music of the 1920s through 1940s, a seminal period in the development of the jazz idiom. Les Flat Out Strangers is a fixture in the Capital City, playing in clubs and festivals and offering a dance friendly vibe and sophisticated sound.

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Common names can be fascinating and puzzling.

Rudy shares some words about autumn, and identifies a tree species.

These days, with convenient hindsight we take it for granted that good music lasts, that pieces that are well known now will remain well known for years -- perhaps even for centuries to come. But I often wonder what was in the minds of the great composers of centuries past whose music we still love.

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.

Miles Hoffman talks about the most popular types of overtures.