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In 1949, a lumber executive and city alderman in Charleston, South Carolina, named Alfred O. Halsey produced a visually unique map of the Charleston peninsula. The map highlights the fluctuations and changes of the urban landscape through time and traces the contours of historic events in the city. Although his depiction is compelling, tapping into a dialectical understanding of the city landscape, there are distinct cultural forgettings and silences in the map particularly in terms of the city's long historical trajectory of racial inequality and systemic violence. The following discussion both unpacks Halsey's dialectical vision of the peninsula, and indicate a space where archaeology can intervene in the gaps and silences in an act of memory-work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on free African American Denmark Vesey and his membership within the African Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The author explains Vesey's role in the so-called insurrection "Vesey conspiracy" of 1822, which lead to his execution, and explores the roles of Charleston intendant James Hamilton Jr. and United States Supreme Court Justice William Johnson Jr.

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina for allegedly plotting an insurrection involving enslaved persons. During his trial, several witnesses testified about Vesey's interpretations of biblical texts. When sentencing Vesey to death, Lionel H. Kennedy accused Vesey of "attempting to pervert the sacred words of God into a sanction for crimes of the blackest hue." As many scholars have noted, Vesey and Kennedy choose different texts to cite in support of their respective positions. Yet this article argues that Vesey and Kennedy's uses of biblical material go deeper than simply countering one set of proof texts with another. They differ on how to apply biblical texts to then current events in Charleston. Ultimately, this difference informs their selection of biblical texts and the strategies they use to interpret them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merchants living in the early modern era experienced their commercial successes and failures not only as participants in great Atlantic world networks of traders and goods, but also as residents of particular local places. Scholars' sensitive and rich portraits of port city commerce portray international traders as the decision makers who shaped longdistance trade, which in turn had a profound influence on the developing character of individual port cities. Integrating and improving across great spans of time and space, the British Atlantic merchant formed coherent networks that shared a language of credit, trust, and profitable exchange. But just as significantly, we can start to integrate the myriad daily economic choices of local city residents with those of merchants, and we can do so productively by recognizing the "cityness" of ports, a quality constituted from the constant interactions, negotiations, and perceptions of their residents within man-made and natural surroundings. This article tests how the intertwined natures of long-distance trade and local cityness affected the different commercial trajectories of three merchants in three different British Atlantic ports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A letter is presented from U.S. writer and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson to his uncle, Samuel Ripley, in which Emerson discusses his impressions of Charleston, South Carolina.

Isotopic evidence from animal bones deposited in urban contexts offers a landscape perspective into urban life, hinting at where animals lived before reaching their final resting place in the city. Here, we use stable carbon and nitrogen isotope evidence from cattle ( Bos taurus) bones excavated from commercial and residential sites within historic Charleston, South Carolina, to evaluate whether markets pooled or segregated access to beef cattle drawn into the urban economy from the broader landscape. Results indicate that stable isotope values of cattle are varied, suggesting a broad catchment area, and differ significantly among site contexts, offering preliminary evidence regarding the roles markets played in integrating the surrounding landscape through market exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the eve of the American Civil War, the Irish who had immigrated to the United States as a result of the Great Famine were in the process of constructing an Irish working-class identity in Charleston, South Carolina. A “legacy” for such construction had been created in the previous century: those who had come from Ireland then had used public displays of celebration and concomitant rhetorical devices to create the impression that they were willing and eager to assimilate. Their rituals at banquets and other public occasions “set the stage”, so to speak, for the next century's generation of immigrant Irish who also found it necessary to articulate publicly their claim to an ethnic American identity. Theatrical venues and staged performances served the Famine Irish well in this endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the Charleston, South Carolina, family the Simons family and how the concepts of kinship, racism, and property relations formed a sibling network within the family. It discusses the attempt by South Carolina landowner Sampson Simons to disinherit his siblings, a dispute between brothers Montague Simons and Samuel Simons against African American freewoman Rebecca Simons, the wife of an illegitimate son of one of the Simons brothers, and African American attorney Moses Simons, Jr.

The article focuses on a French solider Lafayette and his experience in the U.S. during the American Revolution in 1977. Details related to letters Lafayette wrote his wife Adrienne, his journey to the U.S. on the ship Victoire, and his time in Charleston, South Carolina are provided. Topics include the merchant mariner Captain Charles Biddle, the French troops arrival in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in June 1777, and Lafayette's encounter with U.S. President George Washington.

The two-year occupation of Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Revolution demonstrates that umbrages suffered under military rule played a significant role in turning civilians in the 13 colonies against the British Empire. Despite British attempts to encourage loyalty by giving loyalists a say in government, stabilising the economy and guaranteeing the safety of slave property, Charleston's occupation regime failed to win local hearts and minds due to inconsistent and arbitrary policies, conflicts between military and civilian authorities and the unwillingness of imperial officials to restore full civil government to the province. As a result, South Carolinians lost faith in Charleston's restored royal administration long before British defeat on the battlefield secured American independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of U.S. slave trade as portrayed in American public history. Particular focus is given to the travel writer Miriam Bellangee Wilson's the Old Slave Mart Museum (OSMM) in Charleston, South Carolina, on which once stood a slave auction house. An overview of 19th century slavery in Charleston is provided.

Customarily, studies of urbanization in early British America have concentrated on its northern mainland seaports. This article moves beyond a thirteen colonies perspective to define and explore a Greater Caribbean urban world, with Charleston, South Carolina, at its most northerly point. In particular, the authors’ comparison of the internal dynamic of Charleston and Kingston, Jamaica, reveals an urban world that was no more dominated by the demands of the plantation sector than the northern seaports were beholden to their agricultural interiors. Significantly, however, these rich internal urban economies relied on, and were profoundly shaped by, the institution of slavery. In light of these findings, the authors thus characterize this Greater Caribbean urban zone as constituting one strand of urbanization in a larger British Atlantic world that experienced an overall expansion and diversification of the urban form across the early modern period. Most specifically, Charleston and Kingston achieved a growth rate and an economic complexity comparable to other English-speaking towns through their embrace of enslaved people and their labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the ways in which contemporary social and political events shaped the commemoration of the Civil War Centennial in 1960s South Carolina. The Centennial dramatically revealed that the issues that had divided the nation in the nineteenth century remained unresolved in the twentieth. The attempt to create a comprehensive and unifying celebration by avoiding slavery as a major topic was simply not possible amidst the national conflict over segregation. The commemoration ironically came to an explosive head in Charleston a hundred years after the first shots at Fort Sumter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the career of the inoculating physician James Kilpatrick as an example of how itinerant medical entrepreneurs navigated the various knowledge spaces of the British Atlantic World. Moving from Ireland to Charleston and finally to London, Kilpatrick's involvement with smallpox inoculation in the diverse peripheries of the British empire in the early eighteenth century provided him with the experience of controversy and experiment that paved the way for his ascent as a philosopher of inoculation within metropolitan and continental medical circles. This article focuses in particular on Kilpatrick's time in Charleston, an area rich in African and British migrants and then an important outpost of medical information and experimental inquiry within the interrelated medical circuits of the Atlantic world. This article shows how Kilpatrick leveraged the circuits of information that defined the town in order to promote the practice of inoculation and to create a medical and scientific persona that fit the expectations of Lowcountry audiences. Kilpatrick's efforts to promote inoculation in Charleston ultimately failed, but he put his colonial experiences to work in the service of building a metropolitan identity, traveling to London and publishing a pamphlet on the practice of inoculation in Charleston. This paper argues that it was experiences of controversy and failure on the British periphery that taught individuals such as Kilpatrick how to establish their authority as they navigated the medical cultures of the Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1861, thousands of recently arrived Irish immigrants marched off to battlefields like Petersburg, Sharpsburg, and Cold Harbor carrying Confederate flags and Irish banners. Most, like those from Charleston, South Carolina, were not slave holders but young, impoverished, unskilled workers. Their motives remain shrouded in mystery. Were they hapless pawns of the powerful slave-owning elite? What were they fighting for? What was it in their view of the world that brought them to the decision to join the Confederate forces? The answer is embedded in their past experiences, current social relations, and sense of identity. In part, Charleston's Irish workers brought the memory of social exclusion with them to America and struggled to write a different history on Southern soil. Their position as free, white workers in a slave society and their constructed and publicly reinforced identity as exiled patriots and dutiful sons of their new homeland influenced their actions on the eve of the Civil War. In this essay, Irish workers' motivations and sense of identity are revealed through an analysis of the toasts and charters of Charleston's Irish fraternal organisations, the doctrines of the Southern Catholic Church, and the characters and songs of the theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the bicentenary of the banning of the international slave trade by Great Britain and the United States, this paper looks at the way in which the history of slavery has been under-represented and erased in Charleston, SC, the single most important port of entry for enslaved Africans into continental North America prior to 1808. Although current efforts to commemorate slavery and its abolition in the area are encouraging, recent disputes on the waterfront in Charleston reveal how the Atlantic remains haunted by a racialized economic hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article offers a historical overview of Charleston, South Carolina, in order to explain the establishment of speech patterns. An analysis of the type of settlers that came to Charleston is provided, as well as the cultural development of the city that had many cosmopolitan influences such as New York City and England. The crop industry of the city is analyzed to explain the economic growth of the town.

Comments on essay by Michael P. Johnson about the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy of 1822 in Charleston, South Carolina. Reason Johnson's case against the Vesey plot remains unconvincing; Analysis of the interpretation of the Vesey plot as a process in which reading and rumors transmuted white orthodoxies into black heresies.

Discusses historians' interpretation of the plot organized by free black carpenter Denmark Vesey to destroy Charleston, Southern Carolina in 1822. Michael Johnson's interpretation; Purpose of the book 'Designs Against Charleston.'

Presents essays on the city of Charleston, South Carolina in the context of trans-Atlantic culture from 1700 to 1850. Characterization of the economic and social status of the city; Travel literatures of ancient and modern tourists; Role of material culture in the Charleston society.

Presents the impact of the eighteenth century colonial settlement on frontier landscapes in Charleston, South Carolina. Commercial rice economy of the Lowcountry; Centralization of rural landscape in the entrepot of Charleston; Establishment of infrastructures of specialized production by commercial investment of Charleston interest.

Reviews explanations of southern urbanization particularly Charleston, South Carolina during the 1700s based on linkage effects. Analysis of Charleston's economic functions; Explanations of urbanization within the terms of the staples thesis; Charleston's major import and export trade circa 1720 and 1770; Focus on why Charleston retained a colonial and dependent character.

During the occupation of Charleston in the American Revolution, the British army attempted to subdue rebellious inhabitants through property confiscation--a strategy that had particular resonance in Charleston's slave society. British policies that manipulated property were irrevocably bound up in the broader power relations of revolutionary Charleston. By making white men's control of property contingent upon their allegiance to the crown, British policies aimed at furthering military objectives subverted notions of mastery and dependence. Both deliberately and implicitly undercutting the power of elite white Charlestonians and unsettling patriarchal norms, British confiscation policies were, in many ways, in tension with Charleston's established property regimes and associated notions of elite mastery. Additionally, the army's disruptions to the city's social order allowed enslaved people to further destabilize Charleston's racial and gender order during the occupation. The British occupation of Charleston thus upended social hierarches in the city, even as it attempted to reestablish imperial order. The experience in Charleston reveals how contests over property, both real and personal, and the accompanying manipulation of and contestation over racial and gender power relations offer a productive means of understanding the American Revolution's power dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]