Five years ago this week, I launched the first episode of what became a weekly podcast and blog called Charleston Time Machine. The past sixty months have passed like a blur that I can scarcely recall because I’ve been so immersed in the process o...
When Queen Anne of England declared war on France and Spain in 1702, the people of South Carolina were overwhelmed with anxiety about the security of Charleston, the colonial capital. Fortifications built along the town’s eastern waterfront provid...
For more than three centuries, the government of South Carolina has used a ceremonial sword to represent the state’s military strength and civil authority. Held aloft and brandished before crowds of citizens, this distinctive blade has played an i...
In the late summer of 1793, the City of Charleston ratified an ordinance requiring the proprietors of pubs and barrooms to assist physicians attempting to revive the bodies of “apparently dead” persons lingering in a state of “suspended animation....
In the middle of the nineteenth century, a remarkable Charleston organization sought to enhance the education and careers of local youths by creating a new kind of library. The Apprentices’ Library Society, founded in 1824, provided reading materi...
Rival claims to the land of South Carolina sparked hostility between England and Spain that shaped the first seventy-eight years of the colony’s existence. While officials in Charleston considered the inhabitants of La Florida to be jealous rivals...
The history of South Carolina, like any other chronological narrative, is more than just a list of important events and famous personalities. Our history is a complicated matrix informed by the experiences of numerous people with different and oft...
Following his violent capture in Christ Church Parish, the African fugitive Albro was committed to jail in Charleston with a former friend and an infamous pair of convicted White criminals. Days later he returned to the village of Mount Pleasant f...
Following Albro’s fatal encounter with a young White man on Dewees Island, the African fled through the waters of Copahee Sound and across several mainland plantations to evade detection. Meanwhile, the victim’s father traveled to Charleston to al...
When an enslaved African man named Albro asserted his freedom and fled from the Isle of Palms in 1819, the laws of South Carolina marked him as a criminal fugitive. Spied and then pursued by white men on Dewees Island one night in early 1820, Albr...
Processing Request
