Encyclopedia

South Carolina’s earliest formal code of law regarding slaves, established in 1690, borrowed heavily from the statutes governing slavery on…

Slavery was work, and for most slaves it was monotonous and relatively undifferentiated labor. Lowcountry South Carolina plantations were distinguished…

Slave patrols were a crucial mechanism of slave control in the colonial and antebellum periods of South Carolina’s history. From…

Enslaved Africans arriving in South Carolina brought their traditional belief systems with them, and until the early nineteenth century, Christianity…

The Atlantic slave trade was one of the most important demographic, social, and economic events of the modern era. It…

Africans were imported in significant numbers from about the 1690s, and by 1715 the black population made up about sixty percent of the colony’s total population. This marked another distinctive feature of South Carolina, for it was the only colony in English North America where this proportion existed.

An acute, highly contagious viral disease, smallpox was a major threat in South Carolina from the late seventeenth century until…

Smalls’s war-time accomplishments made him a political force in the Sea Islands, with its overwhelmingly black population. In 1867 Smalls was one of the founders of the Republican Party in South Carolina, an organization to which he remained loyal all his life.

In 1943 Smart was assigned to the 9th Bomber Command in the Middle East, duty for which he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. While a colonel with the 9th Bomber Command, Smart conceived of the strategy for the daring World War II bombing raid on the oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania. Smart’s idea called for bombers to fly exceedingly low to bomb the tightly defended refineries, which were believed to be producing one-third of the fuel oil for Nazi Germany.

Artist. Smith was born in Charleston on July 14, 1876, the daughter of Daniel Elliott Huger Smith and Caroline Ravenel.…

Musician. Thanks to the widespread popularity of his instrumental hit “Guitar Boogie,” Arthur Smith became one of the better-known guitarists…