South Carolina Books

W. Chris Phelps has done a masterful job of creating what is both a wonderful coffeetable book, and an excellent "touring guide" to Charleston. His other books on Charleston during the Civil War are exceptional as well!

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As a tour guide in Charleston, I have come to love the buildings that make up our city. But finding that information can be frusterating, even with the amount of preservation that we employ. Giving ghost tours on a nightly basis, I am always asked questions about our locations we tour. So it was refreshing to read Charleston's Old Exchange Building. It finally shed a lot more light on the history of this fascinating building. Starting from the preceding building up to modern times, you get an overall glimpse as to what this building has endured and witnessed. There are fantastic illustrations and photographs both from modern and older times. Not only does it cover the history, but some fantastic stories of people imprisoned in the Provost Dungeon (the basement of the Exchange Building) as well as some major historical events. My only complaint is that it leaves you wanting to know more. But one may argue, is the mark of a great writer.

If you have any sort of interest in architecture, history, the revolutionary war or a fan of Charleston in general, or are a Charleston Tour Guide, you will find this book a great addition to your personal library.

totally correct and professional. With this book's help I knew what I wanted to visit and its' history.

I loved this book so much that I was moved to come on here and tell you all about it. I had always heard of Mary Lee Settle, but had never read her work. I picked this book up in a used bookstore and feel so thankful that I did. Her writing is gorgeous, mesmerizing, full of truths and observations that we all see, but so few can articulate. It's a slender novel and yet rich with detail so you end up feeling like it's much longer than it is. Settle represents this entire community and culture so well that you feel like you know these people, and the love story at the center of the novel is utterly timeless. The book is romantic and heartbreaking and painful not in the popular "pink roses" sense of romance, but so much like the way many have lived romantic love....aching and bittersweet and complicated. I am a writer and an avid reader and this book knocked me out in a way that so few do. Highly recommended. I plan to read all of her other books now.

If you're serious about navigating the crazy streets of Charlotte and the rest of the Great State of Mecklenburg, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book. It is EXTREMELY detailed and very up-to-date. The indexing system makes life simple, and there are several pages with blown-up maps of important landmarks (like Douglas International Airport). Paramedics and EMTs use this book exclusively - we like it so much that our dispatchers send us the page number and grid square for emergency calls! It'll serve you well.

This little booklet is to be a review of the correspondence between Richard Fuller a wealthy South Carolina planter who became a powerful Maryland preacher and a Rhode Island preacher Dr. Francis Wayland who engaged in correspondence on the issue of scriptural basis of slavery. This book of correspondence is available at the price of about $100 if anyone is interested, but our review of the correspondence is not really necessary to the appreciation of this book. Geographically it would seem that Dr. Wayland and Dr. Fuller should be on totally opposite sides of the question. It is worthwhile to note thatDr. Wayland was a student of Moses Stuart. Reverend Hague points out there is not much difference between them. "Eloquent as is Dr. Fuller's argument and appeal, further bad as he is the religious spirit which he breathes, earnest though he is as a creature of bargain to the center, yet, by advocating such a doctrine of slavery as an element of Christianity, he has done greater disservice to the cause of religion and humanity, and could possibly be achieved by all the traffickers of human flesh at whom the law of Christian nations now condemn as pirates.(see page 7).the author believes Dr. Wayland in taking a very soft view of slavery grants a great deal too much to Dr. Fuller. Reverend Hague points out what ever the Roman law was it does not affect the Christian community because their law was the law of Christ. The apostles had been cited as supporting slavery because there is no open condemnation of that in their epistles. "Now in reading what is written to societies so constituted [the congregations in the Roman Empire], it is a great error to infer that the apostles either sanctioned or tolerated any relation between man and man as established by Roman law, because we do not find in their epistles a particular denunciation of it.[p.32]"

The author offers as illustration of the New Testament's condemnation of slavery that very familiar epistle of Paul to Philemon. "According to the law of Rome, Onesimus was still the property of Philemon, who, as a citizen, had a legal claim upon his services; but the letter does not intimate the slightest probability that Philemon, the Christian, would or could urge that claim [see page 43]." the book ends with a parable. We are referred to the time when a great number of white persons were held as slaves in Algiers. "What if, on demanding the release of these captives, their lords should meet us for such Christian arguments as are found in the letters of Dr. Fuller, should declare to us that they had not any thing to do with bringing these poor people there, but they have found themselves in the relation of ownership to them, it just had now become a permanent element of their social organization, if slavery had been tolerated by our old holy religion in the Roman Empire, and that they now appeal to us, by our regard to order, to justice, to civil claims of property which time had consecrated, and especially by a reference for the primitive and prudent teachings of that Christianity which we so much gloried, in which we show ourselves to be lovers of peace, and leave them undisturbed, in the enjoyment of those rights which divine Providence has so long invest in them? Would our friends in South Carolina then be found in yielding quietly to the power of these ` sacred truths,' and paying homage to the intellect of the Christian teacher who headed, by means of them, so wonderfully enlightened the minds of the Algerians? [See pages 47-48]"

The logic of this book is more compelling than many others dealing with the same subject. As a preacher William Hague takes an honest look at the condition of religion in his time and pleads in his last sentence that his readers, "thus, battling against one another sin, they keep it from concealing his native vileness land roving itself in the authority of religion, and proudly wearing the sanctions of Christ, like stars in its crown of triumph."

If you are interested in learning more about this great institution, this is book for you. I couldn't find a better book that describes the rich history of the Citadel in such detail.

This eye-witness account of US troop atrocities on civilians can no longer be hidden. Scholars may have had an excuse for ignoring it, but now that excuse is removed by this easily available, beautifully produced university press edition. The majority of the so-called historians who have attributed the burning of Columbia SC to accident, alcohol, burning cotton, etc., are now shown to be the apologist propagandists for a sanitized American history that they most surely are. In contrast to the eye-witness account, their work now appears laughable. How can we take these "historians" seriously in anything else they do? Truth has a way of getting outside its bottle, and like the genie, it can't be put back. Congratulations to the editor and press for a job well done.

The Civil War In The Carolinas by civil war expert and historian Dan Morrill (History Department, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Director of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historical Society) is a dramatically presented and extensively researched survey and analysis of the impact the American Civil War had upon the states of North Carolina and South Carolina, and the people who called these states their home. A meticulous, scholarly, and thoroughly engaging examination of the details of history and the sweeping change that the war wrought for everyone, The Civil War In The Carolinas is a welcome and informative addition to American Civil War Studies reference collections.