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. He has been digging into archives both here and in Britain, 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.

That change wasn’t instant and some of the history the colony's governance during the transition - as well as that of day-to-day life – are sometimes unclear. However, in researching George Anson, Nic Butler has both found a valuable through-line to this history and shone a light on Anson’s own fascinating story.