Between 1890 and 1915, a predominately African American state convict crew built Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation in upstate South Carolina. Calhoun’s plantation house still sits in the middle of campus. From the establishment of the plantation in 1825 through the integration of Clemson in 1963, African Americans have played a pivotal role in sustaining the land and the university. Yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson’s public history. This book traces “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History,” a Clemson English professor’s public history project that helped convince the university to reexamine and reconceptualize the institution’s complete and complex story from the origins of its land as Cherokee territory to its transformation into an increasingly diverse higher-education institution in the twenty-first century. Threading together scenes of communal history and conversation, student protests, white supremacist terrorism, and personal and institutional reckoning with Clemson’s past, this story helps us better understand the inextricable link between the history and legacies of slavery and the development of higher education institutions in America.

John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850) was born in South Carolina into a family which was already wealthy and important in South Carolina politics. He married his distant cousin, Floride Bonneau Colhoun (1792-1866) and they were the parents of seven children. In 1838 Anna Maria Calhoun (1817-1875), daughter of John and Floride, married Thomas Green Clemson (1807-1888) of Philadelphia. For the rest of his life he was deeply inolved in the Calhoun families political and business fortunes and problems. John C. Calhoun's political career continued to grow until he reached the status of America's statesman. Thomas Clemson's business career rocked between success and misfortune but ultimately succeeded, partly through the inheritance his wife received after the death of her father, John C., which included his beloved estate, Fort Hill. Thomas Green Clemson outlived his wife, Anna, and had only one grandchild. At his death he left a trust fund for his grandchild, Floride Isabelle Lee (1870- 1935) and donated the remainder of his estate, including Fort Hill Plantation to the state to create a university. Clemson University presently sits on the old Fort Hill Plantation of John C. Calhoun.

Thomas Green Clemson (1807-1888), the founder of Clemson University, was a complex man of broad and varied interests. To introduce us to this man, specialists of history, science, agriculture, engineering, music, art, diplomacy, law, and communications come together to address Clemson's multifaceted life and issues that helped shape him.

John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850) was born in South Carolina into a family which was already wealthy and important in South Carolina politics. He married his distant cousin, Floride Bonneau Colhoun (1792-1866) and they were the parents of seven children. In 1838 Anna Maria Calhoun (1817-1875), daughter of John and Floride, married Thomas Green Clemson (1807-1888) of Philadelphia. For the rest of his life he was deeply inolved in the Calhoun families political and business fortunes and problems. John C. Calhoun's political career continued to grow until he reached the status of America's statesman. Thomas Clemson's business career rocked between success and misfortune but ultimately succeeded, partly through the inheritance his wife received after the death of her father, John C., which included his beloved estate, Fort Hill. Thomas Green Clemson outlived his wife, Anna, and had only one grandchild. At his death he left a trust fund for his grandchild, Floride Isabelle Lee (1870- 1935) and donated the remainder of his estate, including Fort Hill Plantation to the state to create a university. Clemson University presently sits on the old Fort Hill Plantation of John C. Calhoun.

Emmala Reed's journals from 1865 and 1866 present a detailed account of life in western South Carolina as war turned to reconstruction. Reed's postwar writings are particularly important given their rarity - many Civil War diarists stopped writing at war's end. Also unlike many diarists of the period, Reed lived in a small town rather than on a plantation or in an urban center.

“Anna Calhoun Clemson was John C. Calhoun’s favorite child. After reading Ann Russell’s biography based on Anna’s letters, one finds it easy to understand why. The product of a famous family and an exceptional woman, Anna was also, as Russell ably demonstrates, very much “a southern lady.” Her story—her “life’s journey,” as Calhoun told his daughter her life would be–gives us a glimpse of an important southern family, of southern womanhood, of heartbreak and difficulty, of a nation torn apart by sectional conflict. Like Mary Chesnut’s famous diary, Anna’s letters, the crux of Russell’s study, provide us with a rich, detailed picture of southern life, both personal and public.”

A new biography of the intellectual father of Southern secession—the man who set the scene for the Civil War, and whose political legacy still shapes America today. John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition," which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union—and arguably set the nation on course for civil war. Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as some observers connected the strain of radical politics he developed to the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right, and as protests over racial injustice have focused on his legacy. In this revelatory biographical study, historian Robert Elder shows that Calhoun is even more broadly significant than these events suggest, and that his story is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. By excising Calhoun from the mainstream of American history, he argues, we have been left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.

American slaveholders used the wealth and leisure that slave labor provided to cultivate lives of gentility and refinement. This study provides a vivid portrait of slaveholders at home and at play as they built a tragic world of both 'sweetness' and slavery.

Palmetto Profiles documents the lives and accomplishments of the inductees of the South Carolina Hall of Fame during its first forty years. As Governor John C. West predicted in his dedication speech, the Hall of Fame has indeed become a "vital and integral part of the history and culture of South Carolina." Nearly ninety citizens have been inducted since Apollo 16 astronaut Colonel Charles Duke, Jr., became the first honoree in 1973. Each year one contemporary and one deceased individual is recognized by the hall for outstanding contributions to South Carolina's heritage and progress. To date, inductees have included political leaders and reformers, artists, writers, scientists, soldiers, clergy, educators, athletes, and others. U.S. president Andrew Jackson, authors Elizabeth Coker and Pat Conroy, jazz legend Dizzy Gillespie, artists Jasper Johns and Elizabeth O'Neil Verner, Catawba King Hagler, Generals Francis Marion and Thomas Sumter, civil rights leaders Mary McLeod Bethune and Reverend Benjamin E. Mays, U.S. senators J. Strom Thurmond and Fritz Hollings, and Nobel Prize winning physicist Charles H. Townes are just some of the representative South Carolinians memorialized in the Hall of Fame for their lasting legacies in the Palmetto State and beyond. Published on the fortieth anniversary of the opening of the South Carolina Hall of Fame and drawn from biographical entries in The South Carolina Encyclopedia, this guidebook presents concise profiles of the inductees from 1973 to 2013. Palmetto Profiles, like the Hall of Fame itself, serves as a tangible link to South Carolina's rich and complex past to the benefit of residents, visitors, and students alike. The volume also includes illustrations of all inductees and a foreword by Walter Edgar, a 2008 Hall of Fame inductee, author of South Carolina: A History, and editor of The South Carolina Encyclopedia.