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.

This week Dr. Jessica Elfenbein will tell us about an innovative strategy undertaken by the town of Sumter, SC, in the early 1920s to try to survive the economic devastation that came about when the boll weevil came to the state devastating the town’s biggest cash crop: cotton. And that innovation involved the entire community of Sumter.

People have been catching and eating shrimp off the coast of the Carolinas for centuries. The shrimping industry in South Carolina, however, only started about 100 years ago. And trawling, or “fishing,” for shrimp became a way of life in the Lowcountry, as well as a way of making a living.“Captain Woody” Collins was shrimping for 40 of those years and he has stories to tell...

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! For almost 23 years Walter Edgar’s Journal has been exploring 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.

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. However, as Moore tells Walter Edgar, religious idealism and commercial realities came to a head 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.

Edgefield native Drew Lanham wasn’t entirely sure what the phone call from Chicago was about. And, after he heard what the person on the phone had to say, he wasn’t altogether sure he believed the news: Drew had just won a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant.”The MacArthur Foundation says that “The 2022 MacArthur Fellows are architects of new modes of activism, artistic practice, and citizen science. They are excavators uncovering what has been overlooked, undervalued, or poorly understood. They are archivists reminding us of what should survive.”Drew Lanham, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, talks with Walter Edgar about his life, his work, his writing, and about what may lie hopes to achieve through his work.

In his fresh and revealing biography, C. Vann Woodward: America's Historian (2022, UNC Press), James Cobb shows, explores how Woodward displayed a rare genius and enthusiasm for crafting lessons from the past that seemed directly applicable to the concerns of the present—a practice that more than once cast doubt on his scholarship. Dr. Cobb talks with Walter Edgar about Woodward and the changing interpretations of Southern history.