The steady growth of Charleston’s population in the generations after the American Revolution required municipal authorities to provide a succession of public burial grounds for its poorest citizens, transient visitors, and enslaved people of Afri...
Graveyards fascinate some people, while inspiring morbid dread in others. Like them or not, cemeteries are an important part of our shared landscape that merit respect and protection. Some burial grounds are more visible or better remembered than ...
April is National Poetry Month, a fitting time to explore the history of a well-known poem with a puzzling past. This famously bold verse from 1769 contains a diverse and sarcastic description of Charleston that is preserved in a single manuscript...
After the South Carolina General Assembly resolved in the spring of 1696 to build a brick fortification in Charleston at the east end of Broad Street, a series of revisions enacted during the following year altered both its location and its design...
The idea of packing books into a vehicle for distribution predates the automobile, but mobile library collections became a reality in Charleston County during the golden age of the motor car. Since the first gasoline-powered bookmobiles hit the ro...
Modern Charleston County includes a large number of public parks and recreational sites at which citizens can gather and enjoy a variety of outdoor activities. We take such amenities for granted today, but their profusion is a relatively recent de...
Chief Justice Charles Shinner garnered prestige and wealth during his first several years in South Carolina, but the enforcement of a controversial British law in late 1765 triggered a tidal wave of political resistance that undermined his career ...
The last six years in the life of Charles Shinner (ca. 1710–1768) unfolded like the plot of a Dickens novel: An obscure, middle-aged Irish lawyer assisted a wealthy English client, whose influential family nominated him for a prestigious post in a...
In the early days of the nineteenth century, a trio of French immigrants living in urban Charleston agreed to reward a hard-working enslaved woman named Catherine by allowing her to purchase her own freedom. After laboring diligently within the ci...
In the spring of 1750, the South Carolina General Assembly purchased the freedom of an enslaved man known as Doctor Caesar, who possessed life-saving medical knowledge. In return for his emancipation, Caesar divulged to a committee of White legisl...