Review by Michel Hammes | From the author of Orphan Train, comes another historical fiction piece about the imagined life of the muse in Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. Kline weaves fact and fiction to tell a compelling story about Christina, living on her family’s rural farm, dealing with illness and coming to terms with the prospect of leading a small life.
S.C. Encyclopedia | First visited by Robert Sandford in 1666 while he was reconnoitering the southeastern seaboard of North America for Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, Colleton County was one of three original counties organized in the English province of Carolina in 1682. However, Colleton was divided into three parishes by 1730 (St. Bartholomew’s, St. Paul’s, and St. John’s Colleton), which took over most county responsibilities, including oversight of elections.
Reviewed by Marianne Cawley | The splendid reputation of this book is completely well deserved. Published in 1984, Down by the Riverside was one of a new wave of works of history that looked at a specific defined community over an extended period in the hope that better understanding of the parts would bring greater knowledge of the whole history of a wider region.
By Marjory Wentworth, S.C. poet laureate
Boats fly out of the Atlantic
and moor themselves in my backyard
where tiny flowers, forgotten
by the wind, toss their astral heads
from side to side. Mouths ablaze, open,
and filling with rain.
After the hurricane, you can see
the snapped open drawbridge slide
beneath the waves on the evening news.
You go cold imagining
such enormous fingers of wind
that split a steel hinge until
its jaw opens toward heaven.
S.C. Encyclopedia | The term “hurricane” comes from the West Indian word “huracan,” which means “big wind” and is used to describe severe tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and the eastern Pacific Ocean. In the western Pacific, hurricanes are known as typhoons. The development of a hurricane requires an area of low pressure in a region of favorable atmospheric and oceanic conditions. Ocean temperatures must be near or greater than 80 ̊ F and wind speeds at mid- and upper-levels of the atmosphere must be light.
From the S.C. Encyclopedia | The term “Gullah,” or “Geechee,” describes a unique group of African Americans descended from enslaved Africans who settled in the Sea Islands and Lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.
The term “Gullah,” or “Geechee,” describes a unique group of African Americans descended from enslaved Africans who settled in the Sea Islands and Lowcountry of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina. Most of these slaves were brought to the area to cultivate rice since they hailed from the Rice Coast of West Africa, a region that stretches from modern Senegal to southern Liberia.
S.C. Encyclopedia | Born in Blackwood, Spartanburg County, on November 21, 1878, Ibra Blackwood was the son of Charles Blackwood and Louvina Burns. After graduating from Wofford College in 1898, Blackwood read law and was admitted to the bar in 1902. That same year he was elected to the General Assembly, where he represented Spartanburg County for a single term in the House.
By Marjory Wentworth, contributing editor
Astronomy flourished at the dawn of civilization;
between the Tigris and Euphrates, Babylonian
astronomers watched the skies closely.
We have the records. When heavenly signs appeared,
the ancients were both fascinated and terrified. …
S.C. Encyclopedia | Lewis (or Louis) Reeve Gibbes was born in Charleston on August 14, 1810, eldest of the eight children of Lewis Ladson Gibbes and his wife, Maria Henrietta Drayton. Gibbes attended grammar school in Charleston and Philadelphia, then prepared for college at the Pendleton Academy in the South Carolina upcountry, where he excelled in mathematics and the classics. A student of five languages, he showed an early interest in botany, astronomy, and physics. Gibbes entered South Carolina College soon after graduating first in his class from Pendleton Academy in 1827. For a time in 1830 he was the classics teacher and acting principal at Pendleton Academy. Later that year he enrolled in the Medical College of South Carolina, in Charleston.
Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry
We Can Do Better, South Carolina! (2019) by editor and publisher Andy Brack offers incisive commentaries on the American South, politics, the common good and interesting South Carolina leaders. Available exclusively for Kindle for $7.99. A paperback version will be ready soon. Learn more.
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