(Originally broadcast 03/13/15) - Richard Dwight Porcher, Jr., eminent field biologist and lowcountry South Carolina native, has brought all of his skills as a botanist, historian, photographer, and conservationist to bear in a multidisciplinary study of the rice industry in South Carolina from its beginnings in the 1670s to its demise in the twentieth century. The result is the book, The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice: An Illustrated History of Innovations in the Lowcountry Rice Kingdom (USC Press, 2014).
Using the tools of the geographer, civil engineer, draftsman and close readings of many primary and secondary sources on the history of rice culture in the colony and state, Porcher and coauthor William Robert Judd have amassed a great body of previously unknown information on rice history.
With this rich body of knowledge in hand, Porcher stands at odds with theories held by most historians of rice culture who generally assert that the plantation culture of rice was in unrecoverable decline as the South hastened to civil war. He talks about his findings on this week's edition of Walter Edgar's Journal.
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