This week we’ll be talking with historian Dr. Vernon Burton, SC Humanities’ Executive Director Jennifer “Bingo” Gunter, and Clemson professor of history Dr. Brent Morris about the importance of South Carolina history in education

Brent Morris is the 2026 winner of SC Humanities’ Governor’s Award in recognition of outstanding achievement in humanities research, teaching, and scholarship. We’ll be talking about Brent’s work and career and about the importance of the humanities – and of history in particular – in education in South Carolina.

This week we’ll be talking with Betsy Teter, author of A Carnival of Crime: Murder, Mischief, and Malice in 1890s Spartanburg (2026, Hub City Press).

Her book uncovers a piece of lost history – accounts of which were lost when a fire destroyed the downtown offices of Spartanburg’s daily newspapers, taking with it copies of the publications that had chronicled the city for decades. Besty has dug into the archives of other South Carolina newspapers to piece together a narrative that is both informative and gripping.

Through ten interconnected true-crime stories, her historical account captures a South Carolina county’s most violent decade – a time when bullets felled a mayor, a police chief, and a beloved bookseller, each in separate shocking incidents.

This week we'll be talking with Dr. Kevin Kokomoor of Coastal Carolina University about his new book, The Cherokee War of 1776: Native Destruction at the Dawn of American Independence (2026, John Hopkins University Press).

Americans remember 1776 as the year liberty was declared, the moment they cast off tyranny and proclaimed the self-evident truths of equality and freedom. But that same summer, as patriots celebrated their defiant new nation, American armies launched another campaign—this one aimed at destroying the Cherokee nation.

In The Cherokee War of 1776, Kevin Kokomoor recasts America's founding moment by tracing the importance of westward ambition and settler violence to the origins of the Revolutionary War. And he uncovers the rarely acknowledged war waged by the emerging United States against the Cherokee people just days after the Declaration of Independence was signed. Far from a spontaneous frontier skirmish, this war was a coordinated, state-backed campaign with a clear aim: seize Indigenous land and crush Native resistance.