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.

This much-anticipated series will premiere on Sunday, November 16, and will air for six consecutive nights, from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. on PBS and SCETV. The full series will be available to stream beginning Sunday, November 16 at PBS.org and on the PBS App.

Today we’ll be switching things up a bit. Instead of Walter and Alfred 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.

In his book Grant’s Enforcer: Taking Down the Klan Guy Gugliota offers a gripping story of the early years after the Civil War and the campaign led by President Ulysses S. Grant’s attorney general Amos T. Akerman to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Akerman, a former Georgia slaveholder and the only Southerner to serve in a Reconstruction cabinet, was the first federal lawman to propose using the Fourteenth Amendment to prosecute civil rights violations.

Gugliotta uses newspapers, documents, and first-person stories, including thousands of pages of testimony under oath taken by a Congressional joint committee tasked in 1871 to study the Ku Klux Klan, a breathtaking compilation of accounts by Ku Klux targets, their attackers, local and national politicians, public officials and private citizens. The result is a vivid portrait of the Reconstruction South through the career of this surprising man.

Guy joins us in conversation this week to talk about how Grant and Akerman took down the Klan.