An anthology of important scholarship on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras from the journal Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association. Since 1931, the South Carolina Historical Association has published an annual, peer-reviewed journal of historical scholarship. In this volume, past SCHA officers of Michael Brem Bonner and Fritz Hamer present twenty-three of the most enduring and significant essays from the archives, offering a treasure trove of scholarship on an impressive variety of subjects including race, politics, military events, and social issues. All articles published in the Proceedings after 2002 are available on the SCHA website, but this volume offers, for the first time, easy access to the journal’s best articles on the Civil War and Reconstruction up through 2001. Preeminent scholars such as Frank Vandiver, Dan T. Carter, and Orville Vernon Burton are among the contributors to this collection, an essential resource for historical synthesis of the Palmetto State’s experience during that era.

2009 Choice Outstanding Academic Title • A provocative look into civil rights progress in the Palmetto State from activists, statesmen, and historians Toward the Meeting of the Waters represents a watershed moment in civil rights history—bringing together voices of leading historians alongside recollections from central participants to provide the first comprehensive history of the civil rights movement as experienced by black and white South Carolinians. Edited by Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Orville Vernon Burton, this work originated with a highly publicized landmark conference on civil rights held at the Citadel in Charleston. The volume opens with an assessment of the transition of South Carolina leaders from defiance to moderate enforcement of federally mandated integration and includes commentary by former governor and U.S. senator Ernest F. Hollings and former governor John C. West. Subsequent chapters recall defining moments of white-on-black violence and aggression to set the context for understanding the efforts of reformers such as Levi G. Byrd and Septima Poinsette Clark and for interpreting key episodes of white resistance. Emerging from these essays is arresting evidence that, although South Carolina did not experience as much violence as many other southern states, the civil rights movement here was more fiercely embattled than previously acknowledged. The section of retrospectives serves as an oral history of the era as it was experienced by a mixture of locally and nationally recognized participants, including historians such as John Hope Franklin and Tony Badger as well as civil rights activists Joseph A. De Laine Jr., Beatrice Brown Rivers, Charles McDew, Constance Curry, Matthew J. Perry Jr., Harvey B. Gantt, and Cleveland Sellers Jr. The volume concludes with essays by historians Gavin Wright, Dan Carter, and Charles Joyner, who bring this story to the present day and examine the legacy of the civil rights movement in South Carolina from a modern perspective. Toward the Meeting of the Waters also includes thirty-seven photographs from the period, most of them by Cecil Williams and many published here for the first time.

The 16 volumes in this set, originally published between 1919 and 1998, draw together research by leading academics in the area of World Empires and provide an examination of related key issues. The books examine French Colonialism, the German Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the effect European colonialism had in Africa and Asia. This set will be of particular interest to students of world history.

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Annamaboe was the largest slave trading port on the eighteenth-century Gold Coast, and it was home to successful, wily African merchants whose unusual partnerships with their European counterparts made the town and its people an integral part of the Atlantic’s webs of exchange. Where the Negroes Are Masters brings to life the outpost’s feverish commercial bustle and continual brutality, recovering the experiences of the entrepreneurial black and white men who thrived on the lucrative traffic in human beings. Located in present-day Ghana, the port of Annamaboe brought the town’s Fante merchants into daily contact with diverse peoples: Englishmen of the Royal African Company, Rhode Island Rum Men, European slave traders, and captured Africans from neighboring nations. Operating on their own turf, Annamaboe’s African leaders could bend negotiations with Europeans to their own advantage, as they funneled imported goods from across the Atlantic deep into the African interior and shipped vast cargoes of enslaved Africans to labor in the Americas. Far from mere pawns in the hands of the colonial powers, African men and women were major players in the complex networks of the slave trade. Randy Sparks captures their collective experience in vivid detail, uncovering how the slave trade arose, how it functioned from day to day, and how it transformed life in Annamaboe and made the port itself a hub of Atlantic commerce. From the personal, commercial, and cultural encounters that unfolded along Annamaboe’s shore emerges a dynamic new vision of the early modern Atlantic world.

"This collection of Civil War-era letters includes epistles from the family of Charles Leverett, an Episcopal clergyman and Lowcountry planter, and his wife, Mary Maxcy Leverett."--Carolinian.

A history of life in one South Carolina city during the American Civil War, featuring personal stories from those who were there. Most of what we know about how the Civil War affected life in the Confederacy is related to cities, troop movements, battles, and prominent political, economic, or military leaders. Far less is known about the people who lived in small Southern towns remote from marching armies or battles. Philip N. Racine explores life in one such place—Spartanburg, South Carolina—in an effort to reshape the contours of that great conflict. By 1864 life in most of the Confederacy, but especially in rural towns, was characterized by scarcity, high prices, uncertainty, fear, and bad-tempered neighbors. Shortages of food were common. People lived with constant anxiety that a soldiering father or son would be killed or wounded. Taxes were high, inflation was rampant, good news was scarce and seemed to always be followed by bad. The slave population was growing restive as their masters’ bad news was their good news. Army deserters were threatening lawlessness; accusations and vindictiveness colored the atmosphere and added to the anxiety, fear, and feeling of helplessness. Often people blamed their troubles on the Confederate government in faraway Richmond, Virginia. Racine provides insight into these events through personal stories: the plight of a slave; the struggles of a war widow managing her husband’s farm, ten slaves, and seven children; and the trauma of a lowcountry refugee’s having to forfeit a wealthy, aristocratic way of life and being thrust into relative poverty and an alien social world. All were part of the complexity of wartime Spartanburg District. “A well-written account that not only captures the plight of both the black and white population, but also offers some amazing cameos, especially the life of Emily Lyle Harris, who struggled to keep her large family in tact while her husband went off to war. This is a lively read and a perfect book to assign for classes covering the Carolina Upstate during the American Civil War.” —Edmund L. Drago, professor of history, The College of Charleston, and author of Confederate Phoenix: Rebel Children and Their Families in South Carolina “Living a Big War offers a fascinating, unflinching look at the toll the Civil War took on Spartanburg, clearly showing divisions that emerged and deftly employing stories of slaves, women, and other individuals to reveal the experiences of people on the home front.” —Gaines M. Foster, dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Louisiana State University, and author of Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913