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The Mobile River presents the first-ever narrative history of this important American watercourse. Inspired by the venerable Rivers of America series, John S. Sledge weaves chronological and thematic elements with personal experiences and more than 60 color and black-and-white images for a rich and rewarding read. The Mobile River appears on the map full and wide at Nannahubba, 50 miles from the coast, where the Alabama and the Tombigbee rivers meet, but because it empties their waters into Mobile Bay and subsequently the Gulf of Mexico, it usurps them and their multitudinous tributaries.

Combining his skills as a veteran journalist and well-practiced storyteller with his two decades of underwater adventures in maritime archaeology, Carl Naylor offers a colorfully candid account of remarkable discoveries in the Palmetto State's history and prehistory. Through a mix of personal anecdotes and archaeological data, Naylor's memoir, The Day the Johnboat Went up the Mountain, documents his experiences in the service of the Maritime Research Division of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, a research arm of the University of South Carolina.

Today, the 20-gun sloop U.S.S. Constellation is a floating museum in Baltimore Harbor; in 1859, it was an emblem of the global power of the American sailing navy. When young William E. Leonard boarded the Constellation as a seaman for what proved to be a 20-month voyage to the African coast, he began to compose a remarkable journal. Sailing from Boston, the Constellation, flagship of the U.S. African Squadron, was charged with the interception and capture of slave-trading vessels illegally en route from Africa to the Americas.

In Shrill Hurrahs, Kate Côté Gillin presents a new perspective on gender roles and racial violence in South Carolina during Reconstruction and the decades after the 1876 election of Wade Hampton as governor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Southerners struggled to either adapt or resist changes to their way of life. Gillin accurately perceives racial violence as an attempt by white Southern men to reassert their masculinity, weakened by the war and emancipation, and as an attempt by white Southern women to preserve their antebellum privileges.

In this edition of his widely acclaimed study, Marion B. Lucas tackles one of the most debated questions about the Civil War: Who burned South Carolina's capital city on Feb. 17, 1865? Before the fires had finished smoldering, Confederates and Federals accused each other of starting the blaze, igniting a controversy that has raged for more than a century. To determine the actual origin of the fire, Lucas sifts through myriad official records, newspapers and eyewitness accounts. The evidence he amasses allows him to debunk many of the myths surrounding the tragedy.

Working on the Dock of the Bay explores the history of waterfront labor and laborers — black and white, enslaved and free, native and immigrant — in Charleston, SC, between the American Revolution and Civil War. Michael D. Thompson explains how a predominantly enslaved workforce laid the groundwork for the creation of a robust and effectual association of dockworkers, most of whom were black, shortly after emancipation. In revealing these wharf laborers' experiences, Thompson's book contextualizes the struggles of contemporary southern working people.

Ben McC. Moïse served with distinction as a South Carolina game warden for nearly a quarter century, patrolling the coastal woods and waters of the Palmetto State. In this colorful career-spanning memoir, the cigar-chomping, ticket-writing scourge of lowcountry fish-and-game-law violators chronicles grueling stakeouts, complex trials, hair-raising adventures and daily interactions with a host of outrageous personalities.

Originally published in 1992, South Carolina in the Modern Age was the first history of contemporary South Carolina to appear in more than a quarter century and helped establish the reputation of the Palmetto State's premier historian, Walter Edgar, who had not yet begun the two landmark volumes — South Carolina: A History and The South Carolina Encyclopedia — that also bear his name.

Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War chronicles the lives and concerns of the Anderson, Brockman and Moore families of piedmont South Carolina during the late-antebellum and Civil War eras through 124 letters dated 1853 to 1865. The letters provide valuable firsthand accounts of evolving attitudes toward the war as conveyed between battlefronts and the home front, and they also express rich details about daily life in both environments.

During William Gilmore Simms’s life (1806–1870), book reviews and critical essays became vital parts of American literary culture and intellectual discourse. Simms was an assiduous reviewer and essayist, proving by example the importance of those genres. William Gilmore Simms’s Selected Reviews on Literature and Civilization publishes for the first time in book form sixty-two examples of the writer’s hundreds of newspaper and periodical reviews and book notes as well as four important critical essays.