When researching the history of an educational institution, it is essential to analyze and examine all viewpoints and stakeholders, including the Board of Trustees, students, faculty, staff, and the surrounding community.
At the College of Charleston, three archival repositories can help you in this endeavor, including the College of Charleston Special Collections, the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, and the South Carolina Historical Society.
City of Charleston. Yearbook of the City of Charleston, 1880 - 1951 (Available at Special Collections & Avery Research Center)
These annual reports of the city of Charleston include information on the College, city-run, through most of these years.
Robert Stockton, “Historic College of Charleston Buildings and Structures: An Evolutionary History,” August 2006, Appendix A in Cummings & McGrady Inc., Conservation Master Plan: Randolph Hall and Porter’s Lodge Renovation, 2006.
Very detailed analysis with good graphics. Note: check the library’s Veritcal Files for other campus “master” plans.
Charleston's Avery Center
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For 140 years, Charleston's Avery Research Center has been a hub of African American education and study in the South Carolina Lowcountry. No other institution compares to Avery's scope and impact on the black community in Charleston, and Avery's compelling story and rich history reflect that prominence. The influence of Avery's teachers and students on society in Charleston and the South is immeasurable; their legacy enduring. Established in 1865, the Avery Normal Institute educated Charleston's African American leaders and trained most of the area's black teachers. Avery flourished and emerged as a leading college preparatory institute, vital to Charleston's interracial environment. The list of important contributions by Avery's teachers and students includes the establishment of the Charleston chapter of the NAACP, a successful petition to secure positions for black teachers in the city's public schools, the fight for desegregation in the sixties, and the hospital strike of 1969--Charleston's last major civil rights confrontation. Edmund L. Drago artfully conveys Avery's history, from its beginnings during Reconstruction to its current incarnation as an African American research center under the auspices of the College of Charleston. With a new foreword by Avery Center Director W. Marvin Dulaney, this edition brings to bear a wealth of sources, including oral histories and private papers, to reveal the history of a vaunted institution. Charleston's Avery Center places Avery's story within a larger social and historical context, offering fascinating insight into the dynamics of race relations in Charleston, the Lowcountry, and the South.
College of Charleston Voices
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In 1770, the founders of the College of Charleston realized their dream of establishing an institution built upon the goal of instructing young minds with a traditional liberal arts education. As the oldest institution of higher learning in South Carolina, the College of Charleston has played an integral role in the development of a variety of young men and women from the Palmetto State and beyond. Numbering in the hundreds of thousands, this group of students--current and former--has enjoyed a unique college experience that they have chronicled and shared in letters to family and friends, diaries, student newspapers, journals and, more recently, e-mails. These personal accounts reveal the effect that the College of Charleston has had on its students for generations, and the ways in which those students have shaped the college's long history. This engaging book features a collection of correspondences written by College of Charleston students, from the school's earliest years to the present day. Individually, these writings offer a candid glimpse into students' daily lives during several periods throughout the college's history. Considered together, the thoughts, concerns and opinions found within paint a fascinating picture of the past at the College of Charleston.
College of Charleston
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The eleventh-oldest college in the nation, the College of Charleston stands as one of the country's most historic academic institutions. Over the past few centuries, the College has provided education and opportunity for students, faculty, and local Charlestonians against a rare Southern backdrop, with a campus that mirrors the architectural charm and elegance of the peninsula city. This volume, with over 200 black-and-white photographs, transports readers on an incredible visual journey across an nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape of Charleston, a time and place unique in the city's and school's history. Documenting the school's antebellum days as the first municipal college in 1837, the turbulent years of the Civil War, the campus's growth and evolution in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and the traditions that continue today, this pictorial retrospective explores the many elements of the Cougar experience: the College's student life, the development and preservation of its buildings, its athletic teams and events, and the many diverse student-run organizations.
A History of the College of Charleston, 1936-2008
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Founded in 1770, the College of Charleston has evolved over time, like the historic port city in which it is situated, to preserve the best elements of its heritage while growing to meet the challenges of the present and future. This history of the college in the modern era surveys its responses to the challenges of the civil rights era, its expansions during a period when enrollment grew from fewer than five hundred to more than ten thousand, and its developments in the midst of transformative changes in higher-education administration and funding. From nearly closing its doors while resisting integration in the 1960s to its monumental growth during the 1970s to the 1990s, the College of Charleston remade itself several times while continuing to offer a high-caliber education in the sciences and humanities.
Charleston and Savannah
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Thomas D. Wilson's Charleston and Savannah is the first comprehensive history of Charleston and Savannah in a single volume that weaves together the influences and parallels of their intrinsic stories. As two of the earliest English-speaking cities founded in America, Charleston and Savannah are among the nation's top historic sites. Their historic characters, which attract millions of visitors each year, are each a rich blend of cultural, environmental, and socioeconomic elements. Yet even with this popularity, both cities now face a challenge in preserving their authentic historic character, natural beauty, and environmental quality. Wilson charts the ebb and flow of the progress and development of the cities using various through lines running within each chapter, constructing an overall character assessment of each. Wilson charts the economic rise of these port cities, beginning with their British foundations and transatlantic trade in the colonies through to their twentieth-century economic declines and resurgences. He examines the cultural and economic aspects of their Lowcountry landscapes and their evolution as progress and industrialization made their mark. Employing both quantitative and qualitative methodologies in his comparisons of the two cities, he considers their histories, natural landscapes, weather patterns, economies, demographics, culture, architecture, city planning, and infrastructure. While each has its own civic and cultural strengths and weaknesses, both are positioned as historically significant southern cities, even as they assess aspects of their problematic pasts.
Commemoration in America
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Commemoration lies at the poetic, historiographic, and social heart of human community. It is how societies define themselves and is central to the institution of the city. Addressing the complex ways that monuments in the United States have been imagined, created, and perceived from the colonial period to the present, Commemoration in America is a wide-ranging volume that focuses on the role of remembrance and memorialization in American urban life. The volume?s contributors are drawn from a spectrum of disciplines?social and urban history, urban planning, architecture, art history, preservation, and architectural history?and take a broad view of commemoration. In addition to the making of traditional monuments, the essays explore such commemorative acts as building preservation, biography, portraiture, ritual performance, street naming, and the planting of trees. Providing an overview of American memorialization and the impulses behind it, Commemoration in America emphasizes a universal tendency for individuals and groups to use monuments to define their contemporary social identity and to construct historical narratives. The volume shows that while commemorative acts and objects affect the community in fundamental ways, their meaning is always multivalent and conflicted, attesting to both triumphs and tragedies. Constituting a vital part of both individual and national identity, commemoration?s contradictions strike at the core of American identity and speak to the importance of remembrance in the construction of our diverse national cultural landscape. Contributors: Jhennifer A. Amundson, Judson University * Catherine W. Bishir, North Carolina State University Libraries * Thomas J. Campanella, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * Glenn T. Eskew, Georgia State University * Glenn Forley, Parsons / The New School for Design * Sally Greene, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * Alison K. Hoagland, Michigan Technological University * Lynne Horiuchi, University of California, Berkeley * Ellen M. Litwicki, SUNY Fredonia * David Lowenthal, University College London * Mark A. Peterson, University of California, Berkeley * Richard M. Sommer, University of Toronto * Dell Upton, University of California, Los Angeles
Defining Moments
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The historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction has earned increasing attention from scholars. Only recently, however, have historians begun to explore African American efforts to interpret those events. With Defining Moments, Kathleen Clark shines new light on African American commemorative traditions in the South, where events such as Emancipation Day and Fourth of July ceremonies served as opportunities for African Americans to assert their own understandings of slavery, the Civil War, and Emancipation--efforts that were vital to the struggles to define, assert, and defend African American freedom and citizenship. Focusing on urban celebrations that drew crowds from surrounding rural areas, Clark finds that commemorations served as critical forums for African Americans to define themselves collectively. As they struggled to assert their freedom and citizenship, African Americans wrestled with issues such as the content and meaning of black history, class-inflected ideas of respectability and progress, and gendered notions of citizenship. Clark's examination of the people and events that shaped complex struggles over public self-representation in African American communities brings new understanding of southern black political culture in the decades following Emancipation and provides a more complete picture of historical memory in the South.
The False Cause
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The Lost Cause ideology that emerged after the Civil War and flourished in the early twentieth century in essence sought to recast a struggle to perpetuate slavery as a heroic defense of the South. As Adam Domby reveals here, this was not only an insidious goal; it was founded on falsehoods. The False Cause focuses on North Carolina to examine the role of lies and exaggeration in the creation of the Lost Cause narrative. In the process the book shows how these lies have long obscured the past and been used to buttress white supremacy in ways that resonate to this day. Domby explores how fabricated narratives about the war?s cause, Reconstruction, and slavery?as expounded at monument dedications and political rallies?were crucial to Jim Crow. He questions the persistent myth of the Confederate army as one of history?s greatest, revealing a convenient disregard of deserters, dissent, and Unionism, and exposes how pension fraud facilitated a myth of unwavering support of the Confederacy among nearly all white Southerners. Domby shows how the dubious concept of "black Confederates" was spun from a small number of elderly and indigent African American North Carolinians who got pensions by presenting themselves as "loyal slaves." The book concludes with a penetrating examination of how the Lost Cause narrative and the lies on which it is based continue to haunt the country today and still work to maintain racial inequality.
A Golden Haze of Memory
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Charleston, South Carolina, today enjoys a reputation as a destination city for cultural and heritage tourism. In A Golden Haze of Memory, Stephanie E. Yuhl looks back to the crucial period between 1920 and 1940, when local leaders developed Charleston's trademark image as "America's Most Historic City." Eager to assert the national value of their regional cultural traditions and to situate Charleston as a bulwark against the chaos of modern America, these descendants of old-line families downplayed Confederate associations and emphasized the city's colonial and early national prominence. They created a vibrant network of individual artists, literary figures, and organizations--such as the all-white Society for the Preservation of Negro Spirituals--that nurtured architectural preservation, art, literature, and tourism while appropriating African American folk culture. In the process, they translated their selective and idiosyncratic personal, familial, and class memories into a collective identity for the city. The Charleston this group built, Yuhl argues, presented a sanitized yet highly marketable version of the American past. Their efforts invited attention and praise from outsiders while protecting social hierarchies and preserving the political and economic power of whites. Through the example of this colorful southern city, Yuhl posits a larger critique about the use of heritage and demonstrates how something as intangible as the recalled past can be transformed into real political, economic, and social power.
Historic Preservation
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This text focuses on historic preservation, and contrasts Europe - which it argues is an elitist enterprise aimed at preserving values - and the USA, where the patterns are more democratic and dynamic. It asks whether preservation is just a media representation and a means of consuming history.
Written in Stone
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Is it "Stalinist" for a formerly communist country to tear down a statue of Stalin? Should the Confederate flag be allowed to fly over the South Carolina state capitol? Is it possible for America to honor General Custer and the Sioux Nation, Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln? Indeed, can a liberal, multicultural society memorialize anyone at all, or is it committed to a strict neutrality about the quality of the lives led by its citizens? In Written in Stone, legal scholar Sanford Levinson considers the tangled responses of ever-changing societies to the monuments and commemorations created by past regimes or outmoded cultural and political systems. Drawing on examples from Albania to Zimbabwe, from Moscow to Managua, and paying particular attention to examples throughout the American South, Levinson looks at social and legal arguments regarding the display, construction, modification, and destruction of public monuments. He asks what kinds of claims the past has on the present, particularly if the present is defined in dramatic opposition to its past values. In addition, he addresses the possibilities for responding to the use and abuse of public spaces and explores how a culture might memorialize its historical figures and events in ways that are beneficial to all its members. Written in Stone is a meditation on how national cultures have been or may yet be defined through the deployment of public monuments. It adds a thoughtful and crucial voice into debates surrounding historical accuracy and representation, and will be welcomed by the many readers concerned with such issues.
Jessica Farrell, “History, Memory, and Slavery at the College of Charleston, 1785-1810.” Chrestomathy: Annual Review of Undergraduate Research, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs, College of Charleston, Volume 7, 2008: pp. 52-71 C of C Student, Honors College.
Kaylee Rogers, “Overworked and Underpaid: ‘Black’ Work at the College of Charleston.” Chrestomathy: Annual Review of Undergraduate Research, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Languages, Cultures, and World Affairs, College of Charleston. Volume 7, 2008: pp. 227-247. C of C Student, Honors College.
Robert Russell. “‘An Ornament to Our City’: The Creation and Recreation of the College of Charleston’s Campus, 1785-1861.” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 107, no. 2, South Carolina Historical Society, Apr. 2006, pp. 124–46.
Scholarly discussion of evolution of campus land and structures.
Kymberly Pyszka and Maureen Hayes, “Dixie Plantation’s Rising Tide: A History of St. Paul’s Parish in Microcosm, South Carolina Historical Magazine,” Vol 117, No. January 1996, pp. 30- 61. (Log in through JSTOR) https://www-jstor-org.nuncio.cofc.edu/stable/44378631
Now part of a larger property called Stono Preserve.
