Walter Edgar – författare

Originally published in 1992, South Carolina in the Modern Age was the first history of contemporary South Carolina to appear in more than a quarter century and helped establish the reputation of the Palmetto State’s premier historian, Walter Edgar, who had not yet begun the two landmark volumes—South Carolina: A History and The South Carolina Encyclopedia—that also bear his name. Available once again, this illustrated volume chronicles transformational events in South Carolina as the state emerged from the devastation that followed the Civil War and progressed through the challenges of the twentieth century. After the Civil War, South Carolina virtually disappeared from the national consciousness and became a historical backwater. But as the nation began to look to the twentieth century, South Carolina stirred once again. It took a world war, the U.S. Supreme Court, and strong-willed leadership to place South Carolina once more within the American mainstream. Edgar has divided this text into four essays, each covering a quarter century of South Carolina history. Each essay has a particular focus: South Carolina’s hectic political scene (1891–1916); a period of economic stagnation during which the myths of the state’s glorious past were honed and polished (1916–41); the impetus that World War II gave to economic development (1941–66); and social changes wrought by urbanization, industrial development, and desegregation (1966–91). South Carolina in the Modern Age also includes a chronology of state history and a list of suggested readings. More than seventy illustrations, many previously unpublished, add a visual dimension to the story.

A New York Times best-selling author of eleven novels and memoirs, Pat Conroy is one of America's most beloved storytellers and a writer as synonymous with the South Carolina lowcountry as pluff mud or the Palmetto tree. As Conroy's writings have been rooted in autobiography more often than not, his readers have come to know and appreciate much about the once-secret dark familial history that has shaped Conroy's life and work.Conversations with the Conroys opens further the discussion of the Conroy family through five revealing interviews conducted in 2014 with Pat Conroy and four of his six siblings: brothers Mike, Jim, and Tim and sister Kathy. In confessional and often comic dialogs, the Conroys openly discuss the perils of being raised by their larger-than-life parents, USMC fighter pilot Col. Don Conroy (the Great Santini) and southern belle Peggy Conroy (née Peek); the complexities of having their history of abuse made public by Pat's books; the tragic death of their youngest brother, Tom; the chasm between them and their sister Carol Ann; and the healing, redemptive embrace they have come to find over time in one another. With good humor and often-striking candor, these interviews capture the Conroys as authentic and indeed proud South Carolinians, not always at ease with their place in literary lore, but nonetheless deeply supportive of Pat in his life and writing.Edited and introduced by the Palmetto State's preeminent historian, Walter Edgar, Conversations with the Conroys includes the first publications of Pat Conroy's interview with Edgar as the keynote address of the 2014 One Book, One Columbia citywide ""big read"" program, the unprecedented interview with the Conroy siblings for SCETV Radio's Walter Edgar's Journal, the resulting live Conroy Family Roundtable held at the 2014 South Carolina Book Festival, and a recent interview in Charleston following Pat Conroy's induction into the Citadel's Athletics Hall of Fame. This collection is augmented with an afterword from National Book Award-winning poet Nikky Finney and nearly fifty photographs, many from the Pat Conroy Archive in the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries, and published here for the first time. Through the resulting treasure trove of text and images, this volume is as much a keepsake for Conroy's legion of devoted fans as it is a wealth of insider information to broaden the understanding of readers and researchers alike of the idiosyncratic world of Pat Conroy and his family.

This third edition of A South Carolina Chronology offers a year-by-year chronology of landmark dates and events in South Carolina's recorded history. Unique to this volume are nearly thirty additional years of notable events and important updates to material covered in earlier editions. Historians Walter Edgar, J. Brent Morris, and C. James Taylor expand previously chronicled periods using a more contemporary view of race, gender, and other social issues, adding measurably to South Carolina's history.While the previous edition referenced precontact South Carolina in a brief introduction, this edition begins with the chapter ""Peopling the Continent (17,200 BCE-1669)."" It acknowledges the extent to which the lands where Europeans began arriving in the fifteenth century had long been inhabited by indigenous people who were members of complex societies and sociopolitical networks.An easy-to-use inventory of the people, politics, laws, economics, wars, protests, storms, and cultural events that have had a major influence on South Carolina and its inhabitants, this latest edition reflects a more complete picture of the state's past. From the earliest-known migrants to the increasingly complex global society of the early twenty-first century, A South Carolina Chronology offers a solid foundation for understanding the Palmetto State's past.