South Carolina Books

I have an old book by Mark Catesby. Half is in French and half in English, it is supposed to one of two volumes, it is not in very good shape,and most of the plates are missing. Do you have any thing more you could tell me about this book?

The _Mercury_ is known throughout South Carolina because of it's "The Union Is Dissolved" headline in 1860, a copy of which hung on the wall in many libraries and courthouses throughout the state until only a few decades ago. Brent Holcomb also is well known, or should be, as probably the leading living authority on the genealogy of and records sources in South Carolina. Over the years, he has published dozens of volumes of "vital records" abstracted from newspapers - birth, marriage, death, and burial notices and even coroner's reports, to substitute for the official records that mostly began only in the 20th century. Holcomb's work always is more useful (and interesting) than that of many abstractors who record only bare names and dates because he provides context with a significant amount of the original article or obituary. E.g., "The deeply felt grief of a mourning family, for the premature death of a beloved brother, had scarcely settled into the calm of resignation ere relentless fate has consigned another to the silent tomb," . . . which certainly should alert the researcher to hunt for another record associated with this family. Then there's the death notice in June 1828 of William Taylor, "an active partizan in favor of our Independence during the Revolutionary War," and Capt. Robert Hatton of the brig Nautilus, who died at "Cape Messurado, Coast of Africa."

This is the best biography of Chesnut to date. Muhlenfeld draws from all of Chesnut's writing, not just her famous Civil War diaries, to build a picture of a woman and a writer.

This is one of the best books around in the growing fields of both women's history and the history of the American South. DeCredico, a professor at the United States Naval Academy who is one of today's most respected Civil War historians, paints a fascinating picture of one Southern woman's life before, during, and after the Civil War. A must read for scholars and interested lay readers alike!

This book is a nicely written (sweetness) and insightful (light) exploration of, well, just what the title says, Matthew Arnold and Christianity. Debunking the charge by T.S. Eliot and others that Arnold was a spiritual dilettante, Livingston convincingly demonstrates the high seriousness of Arnold's spiritual quest and religious writings. In doing so he carefully explores Arnold's own distinctive and highly individual religiosity while contextualizing it relative to the Liberal Protestantism and the Catholic Modernism of Arnold's day--all while also touching on its relationship to certain later theological movements of the twentieth century, many of which do indeed seem to find in it a forerunner. Scholarly and accessible in the best senses.

This books does more than just tell you about the gentleman lawyer, Matthew J. Perry, it sets the scene for him before, during and now in South Carolina. The book puts in perspective what Perry had to deal with as he fought for the rights of South Carolina's African American citizens. He is an unflappable, decisive, thorough, warm, honest human being and a civil rights attorney par excellence. It is well written, with various contributors talking about him based on their experiences. It is well documented, so that it may also be used as a reference tool. It is timely and very readable. I recommend it highly.

Received the book quickly and we found the material to be very interesting. It was just what my husband was looking for and it gave him information on the area that he needed.

Caughey's book on Chief Alexander McGillivray is a "must own" book for serious students of Creek Indian or Alabama history. The primary value of this book is the reprinting of the many letters by McGillivray in his roles as Creek Chief and Creek diplomat, painstakingly taken from the Spanish archives. McGillivray was the only 18th century Indian chief who wielded a pen in such a powerful fashion dealing with various southern states, English and Spanish governors, and the US government. It also illustrates his role in the Scots owned Panton-Forbes trading company in Spanish Florida which was the "walmart" of its day which ran its own ships to the Bahamas and Europe for import/export purposes, maintaining several stores in florida and the Bahamas with sub-agents and traders in what is now Alabama,Mississippi, and Georgia.
Alexander McGillvray has a close relationship with William Panton the primary owner of the business.
The apex of his career is his meeting in person with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in New York City to negociate the famous New York Peace Treaty of 1790 just before the US capitol is moved to Philadelphia.
With this collection of letters in his own handwriting we get to see these events through his eyes.
This book is not a complete history of Alexander and his father Lochlan but the letters presented give us a view of him we can find no other place. There are other more recent scholarly books on
Alexander and his dad Lochlan for the interested student.( see Wright or Cashin).
I see that this book has become very expensive and I hope that some University press will elect to reproduce it in paper back at a lower cost. Oklahoma Press has informed me they will not reprint this book.

Medway is an amazing book, I wasnt bored one minute while reading it, I used to live by Medway and never got the chance to see it so thats why I wanted to read this book, I still want to go to the plantation house, I will one day. BUt anyways I definately recommend this book if you are into plantations and all that stuff, which I am... so go out and read it! email me at brandon@daylon.com

Much of this volume of some eighty-five folk-lyrics on erotic themes is probably the work of the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796). It was privately printed c. 1799 under the auspices of the Crochallan Fencibles, an Edinburgh men's club to which Burns had been initiated in 1786 or 1787 by his publisher William Creech, a founder of the group. Some of the texts included are undoubtedly by other hands; but as the Fencibles surreptitiously published this as a tribute to Burns within a few years of his death, it is reasonable to assume that much or most of it is by the poet himself. The Fencibles have usually been viewed merely as a drinking club, fraternal and convivial. But recent research has emphasized their subversive Jacobite and Jacobin sympathies as well. When in Edinburgh, Burns enjoyed composing bawdy songs for the enjoyment of his "brothers" at the Fencibles, who regularly met in Dawnie Douglas's tavern in Anchor Close to sing bawdry together. After 1789, when he moved to Dumfries, Burns continued to compose bawdy songs (often, like "When Princes and Prelates" with a revolutionary subtext), mailing them to cronies like Robert Saughton, also a member of the Fencibles.

This volume contains the (often corrupt) text of some twenty songs that also exist in Burns's handwriting--material usually omitted because of its erotic content from popular editions of Burns, but included in the standard scholarly edition (Kinsley, Clarendon, 1968). At least twelve of these songs are there established as fully the work of the poet, with a further nine identified by Kinsley as collected and transcribed by him as curiosities.

It is the other sixty-five texts that make this rare _Merry Muses_ volume (there are only two known copies of the 1799 edition) an invaluable resource. The Thomas Cooper Library of the University of South Carolina acquired it when the great Burns editor G. Ross Roy, an emeritus professor at USC, donated his large collection of Burnsiana and Scottish literature to the USC library. Most Burns scholars (including Prof. Roy, who contributes a lucid separate pamphlet describing the complex history of the volume) see the non-authenticated texts in _The Merry Muses_ as Scottish folk erotica added by various members of the Fencibles, or perhaps collected by Burns (an avid preserver of folk traditions). But having looked carefully at the contents, I consider all but five or six of the songs to be either the work of Burns himself or pastiches in which Burns revises as frequently as he transcribes. My reason--based on contexts rather than texts, so not authoritative--is the emphasis on mutual consent. In his signed and authenticated songs, RB is notable for this emphasis on consensual sexuality. The erotic song tradition in Scottish folk literature is, by contrast, rife with cautionary tales of rape and incest, but there are only a few such songs in this collection.

The very existence of this book was denied for more than a century by Burns admirers who were embarrassed by its frank sexual content: this denial was easily enough accomplished with only two extant copies of the work, one of them in the private hands of the Earl of Rosebery! But it is time for admirers of the poet to consider the bawdy songs of Burns. They are definitely obscene: some texts use Scottish vernacular obscenities such as "mow," but others make plentiful use of standard English and the f-word. But as the scenarios (typically--there are exceptions) emphasize the mutual joys of adult consensual sex, I think the term pornography is not quite accurate. The imagery is sometimes gross and shocking, but an episode of "Sex in the City" is more spicy. These obscene song-lyrics (the names of the suggested tunes are specified, but no music is printed) are better read as telling artifacts of masculine (masculinist?) culture during the Age of Enlightenment than as embarrassments to Burns's Immortal Memory. The poet lived a short, painful life, enduring the daily symptoms of terminal heart disease from his teens. Love and liberty--sexual as well as political freedom--were the great concerns of his poetry. For Burns, the composition of poetry (and the sharing it with kindred spirits) were his anodynes for poverty, social oppression (Burns is British literature's only great peasant poet), personal unhappiness, and chronic poor health. Like it or not, the bawdy element in Burns is fundamental to understanding his views on language, poetry, and human liberation. There are two modern editions of _Merry Muses_, but the notes in both cases are marred by sexism and poor scholarship. This facsimile is expensive, but all the profits go to the USC library by Prof. Roy's generous agreement. If you're looking for pornography, you'll be disappointed. If you're looking to understand the total Robert Burns in Scottish cultural context--and to gain insight into the inner demons and drive behind his writng--you'll be surprised and enlightened.