Popular Culture

Big Thursday’s popularity exploded after World War II. By the late 1950s, however, Clemson was pushing for an end-of-season game played on an alternating home schedule, in part so that Clemson could share the tourist money that surrounded the game. Both schools agreed that 1959 would be the last Big Thursday game, which Clemson won, 27–0. Big Thursday ended with Clemson holding a 33–21–3 advantage.

In 1928 Billings succeeded Henry Cabot Lodge II as the Washington, D.C., correspondent for Time, a weekly news-magazine. Three years later he assumed the managing editorship of Life, a new weekly pictorial magazine. The eight years in that position were considered the most noteworthy of his journalistic career.

Arriving off Charleston, South Carolina, in mid-May 1718, he blockaded the port for a week, seizing prizes and hostages for ransom. This infamous feat “struck a great Terror to the whole Province of Carolina.” Plundering eight or nine ships for supplies and specie, Blackbeard held hostages, including Samuel Wragg, a councilman. Under the threat of the hostages being murdered, a reluctant Governor Robert Johnson agreed to a ransom of a valuable chest of medicine.

Blair joined NBC-TV in 1950 and moderated “The American Forum of the Air,” a debate program. He was named Washington, D.C., correspondent for “The Today Show,” which was launched on January 14, 1952, as an experimental morning news program. The innovative enterprise eventually won acclaim with Dave Garroway and Jack Lescoulie as hosts and Blair as newscaster. Blair worked with twenty-five hosts during his twenty-three years on the show.

Standing six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds, Blanchard distinguished himself as a fullback on the West Point football teams from 1944 to 1946. He received the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s top collegiate player in 1945, the first junior to gain that recognition, and was named to the All-America teams in 1944, 1945, and 1946.

In South Carolina, the hotbed was the Greenville-Spartanburg area, where a coterie of talented guitarists contributed to a style that became known as the “Piedmont” or East Coast school of blues.

In November 1926 Chris returned to Atlanta for the first of six sessions for Columbia Records. His initial effort resulted in “Talking Blues” and “Hannah (Won’t You Open That Door),” both of which went on to become highly successful and widely copied numbers that sold nearly 100,000 copies. One of his 1927 recordings, “Born in Hard Luck”/“The Medicine Show,” also did quite well, racking up sales in excess of 40,000 at a time when anything that sold more than 20,000 copies could be considered a hit.

Boyd has published four novels: Nerves (1973), Mourning the Death of Magic (1977), The Revolution of Little Girls (1991), and Terminal Velocity (1997). The last two are part of a trilogy telling the story of Ellen Burns, a Charleston native who experiences an unsatisfying marriage, experiments with heavy drinking and drugs, and loses herself through various affairs and lifestyle changes. In 1988 she was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. Four years later she received the Lambda Literary Award for her novel The Revolution of Little Girls, and in 1993–1994 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

While he was called the “Godfather of Soul,” his body of work forms the rhythmic foundations of funk, disco, and hip-hop. He is arguably the most sampled musical artist of all time.

Among her numerous novels, Byars won the most critical acclaim for The Summer of the Swans (1970), the story of a young girl named Sara and her experiences with her mentally handicapped brother, Charlie. This book won many honors, including the John Newbery Medal from the American Library Association. In total, Byars has written more than fifty books, including The Night Swimmers (1980), Wanted . . . Mud Blossom (1991), and Keeper of the Doves (2002).

During his career Calhoun evolved from “War Hawk” nationalist to independent nullifier to strategist for a unified regional (southern) defense of slavery.

Destined to become one of the most popular stops on the national steeplechase circuit, the Carolina Cup is among the oldest surviving race meets in America and the largest in terms of faithful fans.

From seed to table, Carolina gold was the domain of the enslaved.

The ubiquitous I-house had become the symbol of economic success in the rural landscape of South Carolina’s upcountry by the middle of the nineteenth century and remained so well into the early twentieth century.

Like all mantises, the state insect is called a “praying mantis,” from the way it holds up its enormous front legs, as if in an attitude of prayer.

The adult male can attain nearly an inch in body length, while the female can be an inch or more. Instead of catching prey in webs, wolf spiders are ground hunters that pounce on insects, kill with venomous bites, then consume their victims.

The Carolina wren is a small, energetic bird, five to six inches in length, frequenting human dwellings and gardens, as well as wild habitats.

The Pine State Playboys were essentially a small western swing combo, deeply influenced by the foot-stomping rhythms of Texas performers Bob Wills and Milton Brown.

Cash’s masterpiece and only book, The Mind of the South, appeared in February 1941 to wide critical praise. An instant classic that has not been out of print since its initial publication, the work sought to dispel myths about the “Old South” by tracing the pervasive influence of racism on southern history and culture.

Cow pens, cattle drives, and open range herding—distinctive characteristics typically associated with the American West—were important features of the agricultural landscape during the colonial period in South Carolina....Cattle ranching, a lucrative frontier occupation, appeared first in the lowcountry, where black bondsmen became America’s first “cowboys.”