History's Lost Moments
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Year two, 1823, of Thomas Cooper’s two-year span as president of South Carolina College (now University of South Carolina) was the annus horribilius of that internationally renown professor’s career. The English-born, Oxford-educated Cooper had no patience with juvenile high-jinx. Carolina, as most antebellum universities, was known for its rowdy undergraduates. Yet, history records that it was the school’s president who nearly incited the state into a bitter upstate - lo ...
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
March 11, 1958, Florence, South Carolina"A B-47E accidentally jettisoned an unarmed nuclear weapon without its fissile core at 15,000 feet, which impacted in a sparsely populated area 6- 1/2 miles east of Florence, South Carolina.The bomb's high expl ...
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
There are still Tiger fans who can recall an autumn afternoon in Death Valley 48 years ago when Auburn brought its own Tigers over to battle Frank Howard's steel cleats. Clemson on October 27, 1962, belonged to another age and another place. It was a ...
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
At 4:53 p.m. EST Tuesday, Jan. 12, an earthquake measuring 7.0 (Richter) centered near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It is the greatest natural disaster recorded in western hemisphere history. The last time a news alert grabbed our attention in ...
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
'Character is forged on the anvil of adversity,' so says the old saw. One problem with acquiring character is how, where, and when does it occur in men? We live in an era of endless excuses and artful dodges. Wouldn't it be refreshing to read of a ti ...
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
While it may not go down as 'the day that will live in infamy,' the final CBS episode of the prime time drama Dallas airing Friday evening, March 21, 1980, will forever be a red letter day in television history. Arch-scoundrel J.R. Ewing, the connivi ...
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
On New Year's Eve a light went out in Charleston. John Stanford Coussons slipped quietly into the pages of history that he himself so cherished. The stately funeral at his beloved Cathedral of St. Luke and St. Paul on Jan. 4 was a memorial service fi ...
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
Most history lovers recognize the name Kenneth C. Davis, the popular historian who's made a fortune from his 'Don't Know Much About . . . ' series of books with subjects ranging from the history of the paperback publishing industry (Two-Bit Culture, ...
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Though we have no snow and icicles are rare, still all agree that Charleston has its own grand Christmas tradition. There's a restrained elegance about the stately homes and the simplicity of the decorations. Neither a gloomy sky nor a global recessi ...
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
For many, the casual reading of history is a pleasant diversion from the monotony of all that's modern. For others, the reading of history can be instructional -- i.e., de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1834), abridged edition, is as timely a re ...
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The New England Society celebrated its 190th anniversary this past week. The celebration was held less than 200 yards from the corner of Tradd and Bedon's Alley where the first banquet was held.Charleston's New Englanders were Massachusetts and Rhode ...
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Here's a bittersweet romantic tale to ponder as you cross the Cosgrove bridge over the Ashley. We've always known that those moss-draped water oaks were concealing secrets of a bygone time. Now, thanks to southern novelist William Gilmore Simms, we h ...
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
It makes no difference these days if the Charleston gentleman is “to the manor born” or not. We moderns look to character rather than pedigree, and it’s been this way since automobiles replaced horse-drawn buggies. What matters is that today’s gentle ...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Scarcely a sighting of him has been reported since Y2K. A decade ago it was said that he could often be found in Charleston before noon walking briskly along Broad Street, Wall Street Journal in one hand, legal folder in another. Someone mentioned wa ...
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Catalog the graveyards, cull the archives, consult the Colonial Dames, but you’ll not find a Carolinian worthier of your ancestral tree than that High-Church Anglican, Tory jurist Edmund Bohun. This 17th century English scholar-turned- Hobbesian phil ...
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Mount Pleasant commuters got absolutely giddy in 1969 about their commute home over the three-year-old Silas Pearman cantilevered bridge. Yet, that first ascent that traversed Town Creek was known to truckers as the steepest incline between Miami and ...
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
What a pity it is that we won’t find very much written in South Carolina history books about Billy Rose. From the era of Reconstruction until the late 1890s, one distinguished black gentleman dressed in tails greeted legislators by name daily as they ...
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Did the South’s failure to ban letters of marque allowing privateers to plunder Yankee ships contribute to the Confederacy’s reputation as a rogue nation? The answer is - perhaps -but no more so than did Elizabeth I’s decision to commission her “sea ...
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Year two, 1823, of Thomas Cooper’s two-year span as president of South Carolina College (now University of South Carolina) was the annus horribilius of that internationally renown professor’s career. The English-born, Oxford-educated Cooper had ...
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Forty years ago there was no Charleston Place convention center with grand hotel and arcade of boutiques. Forty years ago there was just one horse-drawn carriage in downtown Charleston — a distinguished white-haired gentleman named Wagener in Bavaria ...
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
There are some who won’t admit it, but not all the commanders who served in the Confederacy were chivalrous knights. To wit, the 1864 burning of Chambersburg, Pennsyl-vania appears to be as heinous a war crime as any ever attributed to the Unio ...
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
When Henry VIII’s mail-fisted minions hauled the monks from Llangollen Valle Crucis in Denbighshire, North Wales in 1535, their exertions brought down the curtain on religious monasticism in the Anglican world. Schism within the ranks of the Christia ...
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Giants walked among us, and it wasn’t that long ago. In turbulent times we’ve always had a beacon of Biblical inspiration to see us through.Historians remember fiery Reverend John Witherspoon, president of Princeton, the only clergyman to sign the De ...
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Meet Jim Gilbert, one of Mount Pleasant's most energetic retirees. Of the hundreds, if not thousands of retired fellows who've settled here in search of the perfect beach or golf course or the trophy billfish, it's ref ...
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Looking for a book to take to the mountains that’ll make you to kick back the rocker and put your feet on the porch rail? Look no farther than Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart, originally published in 1913 and continually in print. And sinc ...
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Much has been made of the martial atmosphere of antebellum Charleston as she ushered in the Confederacy. Relatively little, however, has been said of the heightened mood of sensuality that transfused the Lowcountry on the eve of hostilities. As it wa ...
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