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The structural weakness of sycamores is a boon to a variety of animals.

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.

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 the Great Depression, World War II, a resurgence during the Atomic Age, the turbulent Sixties, the decline of Charleston, its rebound into a tourist mecca, and into the present day.

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 less than the survival of the dream that would become England. The armies were massive. The violence, when it began, was enough to shock a violent age. Brunanburh may not today have the fame of Hastings, Crécy or Agincourt, but those later battles, were fought for an England that would not exist were it not for the blood spilled this day.

The homebuilding boom continues across the nation and in our state, with existing home inventory levels remaining very low and demand very high. When will it end? Hopefully never, says our next guest. Mike Switzer interviews Allen Hutto, CEO of the Building Industry Association of Central SC in Columbia, SC. Disclaimer: The Building Industry Association of Central SC has a business relationship with Voterheads.com, a wholly-owned company of Magnolia Media, Inc., the producer of this program.

Ever since the pandemic’s darkest days bottomed out, our state has been one of those leading the country in improving economic statistics. How is the rest of 2022 looking now that the first quarter is in the books? Mike Switzer interviews Joey Von Nessen, chief economist at the Darla Moore School of Business at USC in Columbia, SC.

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.

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.”

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.

“A” is for Allen, William Hervey, Jr. (1889-1949). Poet, novelist.