Charleston is the most populous city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston metropolitan area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint of South Carolina's coastline on Charleston Harbor, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean formed by the confluence of the Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers. Charleston had a population of 150,277 at the 2020 census. The 2020 population of the Charleston metropolitan area, comprising Berkeley, Charleston, and Dorchester counties, was 799,636 residents. It ranks as the third-largest metropolitan statistical area in the state, the 8th-largest in the Deep South and the 74th-largest in the United States.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau, was a U.S. government agency of early post American Civil War Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. It was established on March 3, 1865, and operated briefly as a federal agency after the War, from 1865 to 1872, to direct "provisions, clothing, and fuel...for the immediate and temporary shelter and supply of destitute and suffering refugees and freedmen and their wives and children".
The Lost Cause of the Confederacy is an American pseudohistorical and historical negationist myth that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the American Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery. First enunciated in 1866, it has continued to influence racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the Southern United States into the 21st century. Historians have dismantled many parts of the Lost Cause mythos.
South Carolina was one of the Thirteen Colonies that first formed the United States. European exploration of the area began in April 1540 with the Hernando de Soto expedition, which unwittingly introduced diseases that decimated the local Native American population. In 1663, the English Crown granted land to eight proprietors of what became the colony. The first settlers came to the Province of Carolina at the port of Charleston in 1670. They were mostly wealthy planters and their slaves coming from the English Caribbean colony of Barbados. By 1700 the colony was exporting deerskin, cattle, rice, and naval stores. The Province of Carolina was split into North and South Carolina in 1712. Pushing back the Native Americans in the Yamasee War (1715–1717), colonists next overthrew the proprietors' rule in the Revolution of 1719, seeking more direct representation. In 1719, South Carolina became a crown colony.
The colonial period of South Carolina saw the exploration and colonization of the region by European colonists during the early modern period, eventually resulting in the establishment of the Province of Carolina by English settlers in 1663, which was then divided to create the Province of South Carolina in 1710. European settlement in the region of modern-day South Carolina began on a large scale after 1651, when frontiersmen from the English colony of Virginia began to settle in the northern half of the region, while the southern half saw the immigration of plantation owners from Barbados, who established slave plantations which cultivated cash crops such as tobacco, cotton, rice and indigo.
The American Missionary Association (AMA) was a Protestant-based abolitionist group founded on September 3, 1846 in Albany, New York. The main purpose of the organization was abolition of slavery, education of African Americans, promotion of racial equality, and spreading Christian values. Its members and leaders were of both races; The Association was chiefly sponsored by the Congregationalist churches in New England. The main goals were to abolish slavery, provide education to African Americans, and promote racial equality for free Blacks. The AMA played a significant role in several key historical events and movements, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement.
South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union in December 1860, and was one of the founding member states of the Confederacy in February 1861. The bombardment of the beleaguered U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, is generally recognized as the first military engagement of the war. The retaking of Charleston in February 1865, and raising the flag again at Fort Sumter, was used for the Union symbol of victory.
Plain Folk of the Old South is a 1949 book by Vanderbilt University historian Frank Lawrence Owsley, one of the Southern Agrarians. In it he used statistical data to analyze the makeup of Southern society, contending that yeoman farmers made up a larger middle class than was generally thought.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
A bibliography of the history of education in the United States comprises tens of thousands of books, articles and dissertations. This is a highly selected guide to the most useful studies.
In the United States, Southern Unionists were white Southerners living in the Confederate States of America opposed to secession. Many fought for the Union during the Civil War. These people are also referred to as Southern Loyalists, Union Loyalists, or Lincoln's Loyalists. Pro-Confederates in the South derided them as "Tories". During Reconstruction, these terms were replaced by "scalawag", which covered all Southern whites who supported the Republican Party.
Peter Hutchins Wood is an American historian and author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974). It has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. A former professor at Duke University in North Carolina, Dr. Wood is now an adjunct professor in the History Department at the University of Colorado Boulder, where his wife, Elizabeth A. Fenn is a professor emeritus in the History Department.
The economy of South Carolina was ranked the 25th largest in the United States based on gross domestic product in 2022. Tourism, centered around Myrtle Beach, Charleston, and Hilton Head Island, is the state's largest industry. The state's other major economic sector is advanced manufacturing located primarily in the Upstate and the Lowcountry.
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
The history of Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the longest and most diverse of any community in the United States, spanning hundreds of years of physical settlement beginning in 1670. Charleston was one of leading cities in the South from the colonial era to the Civil War in the 1860s. The city grew wealthy through the export of rice and, later, sea island cotton and it was the base for many wealthy merchants and landowners. Charleston was the capital of American slavery.
In general the bibliography of the American Civil War comprises over 60,000 books on the war, with more appearing each month. There is no complete bibliography to the war; the largest guide to books is over 40 years old and lists over 6,000 titles selected by leading scholars. The largest guides to the historiography annotates over a thousand titles.
Black South Carolinians are residents of the state of South Carolina who are of African American ancestry. This article examines South Carolina's history with an emphasis on the lives, status, and contributions of African Americans. Enslaved Africans first arrived in the region in 1526, and the institution of slavery remained until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Until slavery's abolition, the free black population of South Carolina never exceeded 2%. Beginning during the Reconstruction Era, African Americans were elected to political offices in large numbers, leading to South Carolina's first majority-black government. Toward the end of the 1870s however, the Democratic Party regained power and passed laws aimed at disenfranchising African Americans, including the denial of the right to vote. Between the 1870s and 1960s, African Americans and whites lived segregated lives; people of color and whites were not allowed to attend the same schools or share public facilities. African Americans were treated as second-class citizens leading to the civil rights movement in the 1960s. In modern America, African Americans constitute 22% of the state's legislature, and in 2014, the state's first African American U.S. Senator since Reconstruction, Tim Scott, was elected. In 2015, the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina Statehouse after the Charleston church shooting.
The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.
Reconstruction in the state of South Carolina was unique compared to other southern states due to heavy political involvement of both scalawags and newly freed African American slaves.
Red, White, and Black Make Blue: Indigo in the Fabric of Colonial South Carolina Life is a book written by Andrea Feeser and published by the University of Georgia Press in 2013.
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