Reared in antebellum South Carolina, Peter Fayssoux Stevens was a typical white southerner until Reconstruction. He came of age in the 1840s and 1850s and fought for the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War. Before his military service commenced in 1861, he was ordained a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church (PEC) of North America. After Appomattox, as Black communicants deserted white Protestant churches in droves, Stevens believed that they might return to the PEC if they could choose their leaders and decide fundamental questions affecting their parishes. When white church leaders refused to follow Stevens’s recommendations, he left the PEC and joined the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC). He spent more than four decades after the war ministering to Black communicants. Although Stevens was not a champion of civil rights, his career provides a compelling case study of a white clergyman who evolved from a traditional southerner and zealous Confederate soldier to an advocate for Black communicants in the church.

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and White communities went head-to-head in the battle over White supremacy versus expanded civil rights. The desegregation movement in 1955 and 1956 placed Black teachers’ activism in the spotlight—activism that mirrored what was happening in their community. This largely unknown episode of civil rights activism demonstrates that Black teachers were willing to serve not only as behind-the-scenes supporters in the equal education struggle but as frontline activists. Furthermore, it shows that South Carolina was an integral site of the long civil rights movement.

Archaeologists have struggled to combine remotely sensed datasets with preexisting information for landscape-level analyses. In the American Southeast, for example, analyses of lidar data using automated feature extraction algorithms have led to the identification of over 40 potential new pre-European-contact Native American shell ring deposits in Beaufort County, South Carolina. Such datasets are vital for understanding settlement distributions, yet a comprehensive assessment requires remotely sensed and previously surveyed archaeological data. Here, we use legacy data and airborne lidar-derived information to conduct a series of point pattern analyses using spatial models that we designed to assess the factors that best explain the location of shell rings. The results reveal that ring deposit locations are highly clustered and best explained through a combination of environmental conditions such as distance to water and elevation as well as social factors.

Recreational saltwater anglers from the mid-Atlantic through the Gulf of Mexico commonly target red drum. Due to concerns about overharvesting within South Carolina coupled with regional management actions, South Carolina explored the technical feasibility of stocking hatchery-produced juvenile red drum as a technique to augment the abundance of South Carolina stock. In order to assess a continued program, in 2005 a mail survey was used to collect data for estimating the economic benefits with the contingent valuation method. The theoretical validity of willingness to pay was assessed by comparison to the value of a change in red drum fishing trips that would result from the program. Benefits were compared to estimated, explicit stocking costs. We illustrate how a certainty recode approach can be used in sensitivity analysis. The net present values (NPVs) for the stocking program are positive suggesting that the program would have been economically efficient relative to no program.

Sand hills in the Savannah River valley in Jasper County (South Carolina, USA) are interpreted as the remnants of parabolic eolian dunes composed of sand derived from the Savannah River and stabilized by vegetation under prevailing climate conditions. Optically stimulated luminescence ages reveal that most of the dunes were active ca. 40 to 19 ka ago, coincident with the last glacial maximum (LGM) through early deglaciation. Modern surface winds are not sufficient for sustained eolian sand transport. When the dunes were active, winds blew at velocities of at least 4 m/s from west to east, and some vegetation was present. The ratio of annual precipitation to potential evapotranspiration (P:PE) was less than the modern ratio of 1.23 and may have been < 0.30, caused by stronger winds (which would have resulted in greater evaporation) and/or reduced precipitation. The Savannah River dunes are part of a larger assemblage of eolian dunes that were active in the eastern United States during and immediately after the LGM, suggesting that eolian sediment behavior in this region has been controlled by regional forcing mechanisms during the Quaternary.

The Carolina Sandhills is a physiographic region of the Atlantic Coastal Plain province in the southeastern United States. In Chesterfield County (South Carolina), the surficial sand of this region is the Pinehurst Formation, which is interpreted as eolian sand derived from the underlying Cretaceous Middendorf Formation. This sand has yielded three clusters of optically stimulated luminescence ages: (1) 75 to 37 thousand years ago (ka), coincident with growth of the Laurentide Ice Sheet; (2) 28 to 18 ka, coincident with the last glacial maximum (LGM); and (3) 12 to 6 ka, mostly coincident with the Younger Dryas through final collapse of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Relict dune morphologies are consistent with winds from the west or northwest, coincident with modern and inferred LGM January wind directions. Sand sheets are more common than dunes because of effects of coarse grain size (mean range: 0.35-0.59 mm) and vegetation. The coarse grain size would have required LGM wind velocities of at least 4-6 m/sec, accounting for effects of colder air temperatures on eolian sand transport. The eolian interpretation of the Carolina Sandhills is consistent with other evidence for eolian activity in the southeastern United States during the last glaciation.