Walter Edgar's Journal

This week, in a "nod to all things Southern," we’ll be talking with Dr. John Shelton Reed about his book, The Ramos Gin Fizz (Iconic New Orleans Cocktails) (2025, LSU Press).In the book, John attempts to reconstruct Ramos’s original recipe using modern ingredients and addresses the question of how and how much to shake the drink, a subject on which there is surprisingly much to be said. Offering recipes for the original drink, a modern version, and many imaginative riffs, this eminently readable book is a must-have for any cocktail lover’s library.The Ramos Gin Fizz was invented sometime around 1890 by Henry Charles “Carl” Ramos at his Imperial Cabinet saloon in New Orleans. It includes lemon and lime juice, egg white, cream, and orange flower water, and, shaken properly, it becomes a foamy white concoction that has been called “the nectar of New Orleans,” “the Cadillac of Cocktails,” and “the Crescent City’s most notable contribution to civilized tippling.”

(Broadcast on SC Public Radio on December 12, 2025) – Today we are featuring a very special edition of the Journal, taken from a live broadcast on SC Public Radio on December 12. Sean Birch, Director of SCPR, will be your host, talking with Walter Edgar and Alfred Turner about the 25th anniversary of Walter Edgar’s Journal. The program features questions and comments from our radio audience and clips from past programs.

Today our guest is Mt. Pleasant native Grady Hendrix, author of the horror novel Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (2025, Berkley Books).The novel is set in Florida in 1970 and is about a group of pregnant teenage girls, living in a maternity home for unwed girls, who discover a book on witchcraft. For the first time in their lives power seems to be in the hands.We’ll talk with Grady about this latest book, as well as some of his past ones, and explore how he came to specialize in the horror fiction genre.

This week we'll be talking with Dr. Jennifer Whitmer Taylor of Duquesne University about her book, Rebirth: Creating the Museum of the Reconstruction Era and the Future of the House Museum (2025, University of SC Press).In Rebirth, Taylor provides a compelling account of how to reenvision the historic house museum. Using the Museum of the Reconstruction Era—known as the Woodrow Wilson Family Home for most of its many years as a house museum—as a case study, Taylor explores the challenges and possibilities that face public history practitioners and museum professionals who provide complex interpretations of contested public memory.

This week Walter will be talking with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about the American Revolution, focusing on the routing of the British and their allies by revolutionary Partisans during Cornwallis’ Southern campaign.Ken will also tell us a bit about his upcoming PBS documentary, The American Revolution. The six-part, 12-hour documentary series explores the country’s founding struggle and its eight-year War for Independence.

Today we’ll be switching things up a bit. Instead of Walter and me interviewing a guest we will have a guest interviewing Walter.The conversation is part of the Spring 2025 program put on by the University South Caroliniana Society: “'E' is for Edgar – Conversation and Barbeque with Walter.” Talking with Walter today is Beryl Dakers, president of the Society and long-time producer with SCETV. Today's episode is part of our celebration of Walter Edgar's Journal's 25th year.

This week we’ll be talking with Dr. Kathleen DuVal about native Americans in Colonial South Carolina.Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as Kathleen will tell us, North American civilization did not come to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well-armed.Much of our discussion today is based on Kathleen DuVal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.

This fall we are celebrating 25 years of Walter Edgar’s Journal!We thought that a good way to start that celebration would be to look back on the launch of our podcast. So, this week we bring you an encore of our final *broadcast* episode of May 2023.Our guest was the Director of SC Public Radio, Sean Birch. We reminisced about the Journal’s beginnings and present highlights from our years on the air. And we talked about how morphing Walter Edgar’s Journal from a weekly broadcast into a semi-monthly podcast would allow us to focus more intently on our mission to explore South Carolina’s history and its culture.

This week we’ll be talking with Nic Butler, the historian at the Charleston County Public Library, who is researching the life of George Anson. Anson, was an officer in the British Navy who, by the time of his death in 1762, had risen to its highest rank, First Lord of the Admiralty. He had also spent 9 years in South Carolina during its time of transition from a colony governed by the Lords Proprietors to a colony of the British Crown.

This week we're speaking with Dr. Henry N. Tisdale, former president of Claflin University in Orangeburg, SC. This Kingstree native has had a long and distinguished academic career, earning his undergraduate degree at Claflin in 1965 and, eventually, becoming the first African American to earn a doctorate in mathematics from Dartmouth.

This week we are going to be exploring South Carolina from A to Z. That’s the title of our sister podcast from which we will select topics that deserve a longer look that just 60 seconds.This time out we'll discuss the ambitious man whose name adorns a Christmas decoration; the aristocratic Royal Governor who just didn't "get" South Carolina; the once powerful leadership body in the colony that lost it's standing almost overnight; and the young, talented South Carolina legislature who had a real impact on our young republic as well as our state.

After two decades of research and investigation, the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust, in collaboration with the South Carolina American Revolution Sestercentennial Commission (SC250), has unveiled the first volume of the Francis Marion Papers, a project that holds the potential to reshape our understanding of one of the American Revolution’s most heroic figures.For this episode we sat down with Molly Fortune, CEO of SC250); co-editor Ben Rubin, and co-editor Rick Wise, Director of the SC Battlefield Preservation Trust, to talk about the work behind the publication of the papers and about Marion and his compatriots in the Revoultionary War.

In his book Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (2025, Crown) Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kevin Sack explores the inspiring history that brought the church to that moment, and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall.In this expanded episode of Walter Edgar's Journal, Sack joins us to explore the story of Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.

This week we will be talking Scott Romine, author of The Zombie Memes of Dixie (2024, UGA Press). The book traces the origin and development of several propositions, tropes, types, clichés, and ideas commonly associated with the U.S. South.Approaching these propositions as memes Scott argues that many of them developed in defense of slavery and evolved in its aftermath to continue to form a southern group whose “way of life” naturalized an emergent regime of segregation.

This week we're going to explore South Carolina from A to Z. Walter and Alfred will take five topics from past episodes of our companion podcast, South Carolina from A to Z, and discuss each at length, giving these people and events from our state's history some room to "breathe."We'll tell you about the man who founded the earliest European settlement - 1562 - in what is now South Carolina. We'll look at this history of a very important ingredient in South Carolina foodways. And, we'll learn about a singular, perceptive observer of the Confederate elite and whose writings add to our understanding of a tumultuous time in our history.

This week we'll be talking with Timmonsville native Johnny D. Boggs about his latest novel, Bloody Newton: The Town from Hell, his journey from a childhood in the Pee Dee, his life in Santa Fe, New Mexico,and his career as a celebrated author of Western fiction. Bloody Newton has just won for Johnny his tenth Spur Award from The Western Writers of America.

This week we going to explore South Carolina from A to Z. That’s the title of our sister podcast and the title tells you all you need to know about what that podcast does: Letter by letter Walter goes through the South Carolina Encyclopedia, giving you bite-sized takes on the history of the Palmetto State. The challenge he faces for each episode is that it is only one minute long - 145 to 149 words of text to cover the topic.On today's Journal Walter and Alfred are taking five topics from past editions of South Carolina from A to Z and are discussing each at length, giving some of these people and events from our state's history room to "breathe."

This week author and journalist Carolyn Click joins us to talk about her new book, The Cost of the Vote: George Elmore and the Battle for the Ballot (2025, USC Press). Elmore's story is that of a man who believed, with uncommon boldness, that he and other Black Americans were guaranteed the right to vote. He volunteered to become the plaintiff in the NAACP lawsuit that successfully challenged the all-white Democratic primary in South Carolina in 1946.Carolyn centers her story on Elmore, his family, his neighbors, and the activists and lawyers who filed the suit. Although Elmore's court challenge would prove successful, he and his family paid a steep personal price.

This week we'll be talking with Andrew Waters about his latest book, Backcountry War: The Rise of Francis Marion, Banastre Tarleton, and Thomas Sumter (2024, Westholme Publishing). In it Andrew weaves the history of three key leaders in the American Revolution into in a single narrative, focusing on the events of 1780 in South Carolina that witnessed their collective ascendance from common soldiers to American legends. It was a time when British victories at Charleston and Camden left the Continental Army in tatters and the entire American South vulnerable to British conquest. Yet in those dark hours, Sumter, Marion, and others like them rose in the swamps and hills of the South Carolina wilderness. Their collective efforts led to the stunning American victory at Cowpens and a stalemate at Guilford’s Courthouse the following year that finally convinced British general Charles Cornwallis to abandon the Carolinas for Virginia and eventually to Yorktown where his beleaguered army surrendered.