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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 Edgar talks with Donald Wright about the myths about and some of the hard facts of the Atlantic slave trade.

“F” is for Flat Nose. Flat Nose, a bulldog owned by Barney Odom of the small community of Doversville in Darlington County, became a national sensation in the late 1980s—known for his ability to climb pine trees.

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).

Imagine, for a moment, Mozart walking down Broadway, in New York City. It’s not so easy. But Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote the librettos for Mozart’s operas Don Giovanni, The Marriage of Figaro, and Così fan tutte, died a New Yorker.

“C” is for Camp Croft. This United States Army Training Center, located on 22,000 acres southeast of Spartanburg, was established in December 1940 and named for Major General Edward Croft, a Greenville native.

Syncopation is a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm. It’s the placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur.

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.

“F” is for Fort Mill (York County; 2020 population 24,521). Although White settlers did not arrive in the area until the late 1750s, the region was already populated by Indigenous people.

It was Beethoven who liberated the timpani from the trumpets, expanding their role and the range of notes they played, and even writing solo passages for them.

Syncopation is a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm. It’s the placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur.