to grow old in a country that is in your own i was entering my 50's. it's probably my last couple of jobs. i thought we would have a lot of long-term decisions as a family to take. my children would be then unfair to bring them back to britain as teenagers from the american suburbs to bring them back to live in south london, it wouldn't be great so we had to make a decision as a family about where we would be and that also is wide we decided to come back. >> host: you can always go live with your american daughter. justin webb "cheers, america" how an englishman learned to love america this is booktv on booktv on c-span2 in london. .. bodies.

>> guest: boy, there is, there is no word the processed food industry hates more than the a word, addiction. and i do try to use it sparingly because they can rather convincingly argue that there are some differences between food cravings and narcotic cravings, certain technical thresholds. however, when they talk about the allure of their foods, again, their language can be so revealing. they use words like craveable, snackable, moorishness. and i was rathe welcome to columbia, south carolina on booktv. with the help of our local time warner cable partners, for the next hour, we'll feature the

capital city and the surrounding hour visiting places like the basin to learn about its history and meet authors who help us understand the history of the state and our nation. >> the native americans in south carolina were interesting and different from others in that, yes, we had major tribes, others ran them out, and in south carolina, there were mostly extended family. >> mary chestnut was one of the most famous women of the 19th century. she was an author. she was the wife of a u.s. senator who resigned his senate seat when abraham lincoln was elected, and he came home to south carolina and became an aid camp of confederate president jefferson davis, and throughout the war, she kept a diary, and it's one of the most famousing s

accounts of the civil war. >> we begin sitting on the porch of woodrow wilson's childhood home and learn more about the connections to south carolina. >> born in vairs, lived during the civil war in georgia, augusta, georgia, and then moved with his family here in 1870. he was a novelty. he had been a professor, nobody thought he would be much of a governor, came from nowhere politically, and within a couple years, became governor, and hit new jersey at the same time. there was a national move for reform, and wilson pushed through a number of reforms in new jersey. people didn't expect him to be able to do that, so it was -- it was very effective, and it gave a national prominence he wouldn't have had otherwise. in the late 18 00s, the president became essentially age

of the congress. congress drafted legislation, wrote it, and the president simply was to carry art the legislation. most presidents in the late 18 00s saw the role as executives of the will of congress, didn't take leadership roles themselves. the 2 # 1st century came along, presidents in the early 20th century, thee dore and wilson thought in terms of challenges they thought much more or jnt than that and didn't think the president should be anything more than than executor of the congress' will, so they pushed to have a forceful presidency, and that's what happened, you see the presidency as we know it, the president proposes policy, the person who leads and pushes congress to do things. it was a reversal o rl

wilson was affected, and theodore was affectedded in doing a set of things, but wilson gave content to it, and wilson pushed through an extraordinary role, extraordinary list of things. also they responded to the urbanization of the united states, the country getting bigger, more industrial, people unhappy with the domination of the country by big business, so what they were doing, what roosevelt was proposing and what wilson was very effective in doing was pushing to a program to bring business under control, so they were -- this is what was known as the progressive period and the progressive legislation. you exert the role of the federal government and control and direct the economy in various directions, and then both of them also, of course, saw the need for a major new role for the united states and the world, and roosevelt pushed

hard for that, and wilson, of course, had a very port role in defining america's place in the world and responsibility for maintaining peace around the world, and that's the thing we think of when we think about the league of nations this world war i. this is a real transformation of the presidency that took place in the early 20th century in which roosevelt and wilson were really partners in a way, although rivals, they were also partners in working in similar kind of directions. in terms of domestic issues, i would be the most important single thing wilson did was create the federal reserve system, which was to create a banking some that would allow money to be moved around the country and finances to be there in ways they had not been before, and that was a way of modernizing the economy so when a crisis took place in san fransisco, for example, that didn't bring down the rest of the troilized and

brought to where they are needed across the country, money could be moved from one side of the country to the other or even around the world. all of this was a system which had not existed before. there was a sires of independent tags, and the federal reserve system united them and brought them together to work together. that was a major breakthrough. wilson adopted or pushed through congress a new anti-trust system, a way of regulating and controlling the size of business and making sure that the competition continued, very important. he pushed through the first child -- federal child labor law, and a number of other things which were extremely important and really modernized the economy and the government. the failure that everybody knows about and everybody thinks about is the failure to succeed in getting the senate to ratify the treaty of versailles and have the united states join the league of nations. that was seven a --

certainly a notable failure. whether it was catastrophic as wilson thought or not is another question. the problem with the whole league of nations idea was in order for it to work meant that countries had to work together, give up their own sovereignty, and no one was eager to do that, including wilson, so how you make a cooperative international organization work when nobody's willing to surrender sovereignty is a problem. the government, of course, changed dramatically. it was new for the president to take the lead in the countries in a way that wilson did. it was unusual, i think, for a president to be the fore front of the administration, and i think it was also where now much more used to it, and i would say know what happened is congress really reasserted its role in a way it had not for a number of years. i think the thing that bothered

the leaders of the opposition in congress, particularly about wilson was they saw him as arrogant and dictating to them. they thought that he was overbearing and unflexibility, and since some of them were also over bearing and unflexible, it caused a spectacular collision. it did have, in fact, a series of depression upon occasion. it didn't seem to me to have affected his work, but what, of course, did affect his work was his physical health, and particularly, that was true in the end of the presidency in the fight over the league of nations, just as the thing was coming to the treaty of versailles was coming to a vote in the senate, the -- he had a massive stroke that paralyzed him and left him really without the ability to lead in the way that he had before. he had been extremely effective as president in negotiating with

congress and getting what he wanted from them and getting the gist of it, but without having to have exactly things the way he wanted them, he lost that ability, that flexibility to compromise and negotiate. as a result, when the battle came down to it in the end in 1912-1919, he got beaten because he simply couldn't do it anymore. that was in large part, i think, his health. i don't think it's entirely that. there's issues of some importance between the senate and the president, but, certainly, his health played a major role in the failure to get the treaty passed. i think people tend to think of wilson as a sort of moralist who thought of a policy and strictly moralistic terms, very rigid, and inflexible. i think people don't know how

effective wilson was in terms of as a politician. he was amazingly effective politician, and that's really the secret of his set, and it's difficult to define exactly how he did that, but he was very skilled in working with other people, though he didn't seem to like other people very much. i think people ought to understand that wilson is probably one of the most important presidents of the 20th century, that he really helped to transform the presidency, make it the center of the government. he, certainly, is, people should understand, he played a major role in the world even though tee didn't succeed in getting the league of nations adopted, nevertheless, the principles that lie behind the league of nations are ones which the united states pursued every since shaping the way modern american foreign policy operated ever since. now, from columbia, hear

from walter edgar, the author of "south carolina: a history,," records over 457 years of recorded history. >> when i was asked to do this by the university press, i had not done a new history on south carolina since the 1930s, and as i worked, a theme came out, and that was how you deal with community, either those within the community or those left outside the community on the margins. that's all part of the story. the book starts with prehistory, depending upon the archaeological site, we can go back more than 10,000 years to native american sites on the savannah river. it's a little bit controversial where they really -- what we call native americans or something else? that's not yet been decided. the native americans and in south carolina were interested in a little bit different from others in that, yes, we had some major tribes, the cherokee in

the mountains and the border in north carolina, but in south carolina, there were mostly extended families, 50, 60 people, which in terms of european settlement intruding into native american territory made it different from the confederacy in virginia or king phillip's war in massachusetts where you have very large native american nations or tribes right at the settlement areas. most of the rivers in south carolina, if people asked me, what were the names of the native americans, i say look at the names of the rivers a they are named after native american tribes. the earliest european settlers did not come from europe, but anglo-caribbean, coming from primarily bar barbados, but they were considered to be a barbadian. what's -- that's what the low lsh locals called them.

they came with capital, slaves, a colony on the frontier, and that's how south carolina succeeded from the get-go, and they just were not interested in having outside forces, in their case. the lord proprietors who owned south carolina telling them what to do, particularly in financial economic affairs. there's the revolution of 1917, the overthrown of the american colonies prior to 1776. they tossed the proprietors out, became a colony, and this was referred to as secession one, and secession two was the war, and the government here ceased in 1769-1770 # because of the internal dispute between our elected common house of assembly and royal authority. the road to revolution was pretty much taken in 1771, 72,

and 73, and bloodshed in south carolina before the declaration of independence. this was the second state to adopt a state constitution in march 1776 before there was the declaration of independence. we come to secession three, people outside of south carolina recognize as the civil war. call claiting the -- beginning in the 1820s, there's the question of how do you deal with a majority of the population who are enslaved? south carolina had the largest enslaved population of any state in terms of percentage in the united states. 1860, it was almost 60% of the population, and if slavery were abolished, as many in the north were calling for in the 1850 #s, what do you do with the population that's all of the sudden a majority? do they dwet citizenship? do they vote? what about economic competition for the white working class? there were a lot of issues involved, but south carolina made a decision to, a snap

decision in 1860, that if lincoln and the republican party came to power in november 18 # 60 elections, that they would leave the union. that was not a constitutional issue. that was a political issue. nay said south carolina and our way of life cannot endure in a union headed by the republican party and lincoln in 1860. to talk about ben tillman on the campus of the university of south carolina is interesting because he tried to shut the university down. he led a political faction to overthrow the old guard in south carolina led by the former civil war heros like wade hampton with the goal to establish an agricultural college, this was clemson college, and shut down the other institutions of higher education in the state which were the military college of south carolina and the south carolina college. primarily because his political enemies, these were the strongholds. he also created the first state supported black school in south

carolina, which was south carolina state university. the idea being that if we have a separate school, there's no way they will be able to -- that african-americans would be able to enter clemson or south carolina college, or now the women's college in south carolina, he was no longer governor, but theu.s. senator and power in the state. south carolina, since world war ii has undergone a complete political trance formation gone from being one of the solid white democratic states in the south to a predominant, in fact, pretty much overwhelmingly republican red state in the 21st century. that first began to occur, that breakup of the old democratic domination came when thurman ran on the state's right ticket in 1948 because for the first time in almost a century, it was acceptable for a white person to vote for somebody other than a democrat. then in the 50s, you have democrats for eisenhower, and so

the transformation began, and in the 1860s parties, watson, the u.s. representative from the columbia area switched parties, and the republican party begins to grow by leaps and bondses. the voting rights act certainly helped sphur the growth of the democratic party allowing african-americans to be registered, and initially, for about 10-15 years, the democratic party was black and white log tores and party officials and what have you, but gradually, this state, the republican party, is overwhelmingly white. the democratic party is majority african-american, although there are white democrats in the state. i guess the biggest change in terms -- other than party, is that from the early 1900s until about ten years ago. south carolina's politicians thought the best to do for the state was bring home the bacon. military basis, federal funding,

what have you. now we have had in the past 10-15 years, members of congress oppose projects in south carolina, whether it's deepening the port of charleston, that would have been unheard of a generation ago. when i wrote the history, i wanted the story from everyone from the low country to the middle hill in spartanburg, and i didn't include people and events just to be politically correct. there's contradictions in south carolina. it's a wonderful place. it's just who we are. it's full of independence, but a lot of it has to do with, again, my whole theme, and that is community. >> on a recent visit to south carolina with the help of the local partner, booktv looked at columbia's cultural and literary history. columbia hosts more than 15 museums, and it's home to the state's largest university, the university of south carolina. two historically black schools, allen university and benedict

college, and columbia college, a liberal arts college for women. >> i'm elizabeth, and i'm the director of the urban department of rare books here at the university of south carolina. welcome to the vault. today, we'll be talking bow the robert collection of historical atronmy, fortunate to receive the collection of over 53 # 00 books in 2011. robert ariel was a gentleman born in sumter, south carolina, came to the university, was an english major. from the time he was a 3rd grader, he had an interest in astronomy and continued to by more and more sophisticated telescopes, and 50-60 years later, he has over 5300 books, and over 200 telescopes and scientific instruments related

to astronomy. this is the book that started it all, robert ariel views as a 3rd grader in the school library, and this is the field book of the skies that william tyler alcot, checked it out so many times, he realizedded he needed to buy one. this is a well used book, but by no means is the earliest book in the collection. the earliest book is a book we added to the collection just this year, app early 16th century textbook, and it was the major textbook on astronomy for about 125 years. he very deliberately collected star atlases, and the first star atlas is pickle amani atlas prior to the time of engraving, they produced a star atlas, and this one dated 15 # 40 was produced bid woodcut.

it's absolutely amazing. it's a beautiful period binding, very fortunate to have that, and that is the first known star atlas. robert, as an observational astronomer, had a great interest in the early star atlases. there's bears, dating from 1603, it's an absolutely stunning atlas in which the engravings include drawings over them showing the as logical symbols we all know of the 17th century star atlas. the collection includes all the other major early star atlases. this is the collection from 1742. you'll notice the mappings of the helps, again, describing the system of the planets in coal --

color, hand colored, and the accessions were important to robert as he became more and more interested in how others perceived the helps, the history of scientific understanding of the heavens from his perspective as the observational astronomer. this is the observation of the work finished in 1750s, but not published until 1786, and our copy has this title page which is very rare. we're one of very few libraries in the world to have all the early star atlases, but the p strength of the collection is that it relates to popular astronomy and observational astronomy. robert being a member of the american association of variable star observers and an active one at that. other strengths of the collection include the works of

major observatories, periodical publications of the observatories, and reflect robert's interest in telescopes and scientific instruments. as he came to restore telescopes as part of the work, he did a lot of research and actually published on alvin clark, and clark telescopes are a major part of his collection, and we own 5 lot of material on alvin clark and the other early makers. there is a past month, a history of the 18th century telescope, and our copy has a wonderful foldout engraving, and that's online as well, and then we also have the companion piece, the museum holds the actually telescope, an example of what we exicted together. one of my favorite books is mechanism of the heavens, and

this is mary summerville, 1831. she was an important observational astronomer, and, again, this is representative of one of the number of books we have by women who had a great deal of influence in the field. the collection's still growing. we're really pleased at that. again, we're glad that robert helped provide for its future growth. the library has a strong commitment to that as well, and our cooperative agreement within the museum is very beneficial to both institutions, and when you think of the history of space exploration in our lifetime, we learned an awful lot, but there's still a lot left to be learned. >> columbia, the location of booktv's most recent visit was south carolina's first planned city with wider streets arranged in a grid, but columbia did not have a single paveed road until

1908. the area is also home to fort jackson, the initial entry training for half of all soldiers entering the army every year. >> a history of sierm agent vism in america. buying power comes from a term usedded by one of the groups i look at call the league of women shoppers. the slogan was use your buying power for justice, and the idea behind that slogan was that americans consume a lot of goods, and consumption is a powerful way of making a moral statement, and in the book, i try to extend that idea of the league of women shoppers two existed in the 30 #s and 40 #s throughout all american history to argue americans have consistently used their buying power for political and moral and ethical purposes. con seven rare commentators describe consumption as an a-political act, an act that and that is often considered as

private and individual, but i think history shows that americans have had another side in how they view consumption, which is viewing consumption as connecting us with other people, connecting us to the people who make the goods we buy, kecking us to other people who maybe buy or don't buy through boycotting similar goods, and in the book, i tried to show that americans, i think, have been deeply concerned about the moral impact of the their shopping. the tradition of consumer activism is as old as the american nation, indeed, a little bit older. i trace it back to the runup of the american revolution when the nonimportation movement began, as it was called. this was a movement led by colonists, particularly to get merchants, not to import goods from great britain, and one of the ways in which americans first defined themselves as a nation rather than as british colonial subjects was in that process of boycotting british

goods and beginning to try to buy goods that were domestically produced, this wassed radically new political movement, and was one of the things that led to the formation of the american nation, probably the most important and famous event in this process was the boston fairway party where british tea was dumped overboard by the american colonists who wanted others not to buy british goods. this was seen as a way of weakening british colonial power, but also as establishing a new national identity. one of the things i find is that a lot of american historians know about the revolution and nonimportation movement, but when they think of consumer act virgin islands, they think of the boycott in the 1950s. americans have turned to consumer politics consistently from the american revolution

true the entire 19th century to the present. what i look at is the movement by abolitionists to boycott slave made goods beginning in the 1820s and was a movement called the free produce movement with the idea that people who opposed slavery needed to not buy goods made by slaves with the argument made by the abolitionists was that purchasing slave-made goods was tax amount to hiring a slave yourself. what they tried to do was say there's really no moral difference of being a slave owner and a consumer of slave-made goods. essentially, you're supporting the slave owner, and you're sporting the system of slavery, and so this was a movement that was never marchly large, but it had a big social impact, and the other ning that this group did was sets up stores in which they sold what they called free

prostitution, there is, goods that were made by nonslave labor, but free labor. their idea was as more and more americans bought those goods, there was an inacceptabilityive -- incentive to switch over from hiring human beings as slaves to free wage laborers for the employment. the movement never succeeded. the free produce stores were not economically successful, but i argue in the book thigh set an important precedent of not only the boycott, back to the american revolution, but also what today we call the bycot which is to try not to only punish those who are doing things you don't like, but reward those who are doing things that you do like. the free produce stores were the first i discovered that did that. for a lot. there was no difference between buying power and political power. buying power they argued was a kind of political power, not the only kind of political power,

but they argued that in is society that was no longer consistent with the a similar society, in other words, americans were not making goods for themselves, but a market based society from the very early 19th century; therefore, when you purchase goods, you were establishing relations. these were invisible because you didn't see the farmer who grew the wheat that you bought to make the bread that you bought or butter or clothing or eventually the technology that more and more americans were buying, but even though u you didn't see them, you had a real and direct connection to them and morally responsible for the conditions in which they worked, and this idea was repeated again and again throughout the 19th into the 20th century, and the idea here was that if you define politics broadly as how we treat one another, how we -- the kind of ethical systems that are important to us, then buying

power was a form of political power. now, in the 20th century, consumer activists began to talk explicitly about the role of the government in protecting consumer rights, in promoting interests of consumers as a group in society, but even before that consumer activism was deeply political. in fact, in the book, i call consumer activism an american political tradition. largely unknown, but i think if you look, you see 24 -- this is one of the most consistent threats of our political activity. boycotts have two fundamental ideas. one is economic and the other is political, and these are often related, so one aspect of a boycott is to economically harm those who are doing what the boycotters see as something wrong or immoral, so in the example of the abolitionist boycotts, the goal was to

economically home slave owners, but i would say it's not really to harm the economy as a hole because the abolitionists believed, really, in the free market ideas. they believedded that if you give people incentives to do other things, they will do it. if you give slave owners the insentsive to hire free labor, they do it. give consumers the incentive to buy free labor goods, they will do it, and it doesn't harm the economy, and, in fact, they argue it's a good thing for the economy because there's more wage earners in the economy, money in the economy, and they, in turn, buy more goods, and so forth, so in general, the idea of boycotters has been to harm a particular segment of the economy, on a temporary basis, but that would ultimately, in the long run, be good for the economy as a whole, and in most cases, the goal was not to drive a business out into bankruptcy, but to get the business to change its practices in some way, and so they often tried to

do that. you do see extreme examples of boycotts where there's a lot of personal and they want to harm a particular business, man, or corporation, but by and large, the attitude of boycotters is if the person changes what they do, we'll spend money there. there's nothing personal in this. this is more, again, a matter of ethics and morals. often time, the other side of boycotts is to raise consciousness about the issue. the goal has been partly to have an economic impact, but oftentimes to let americans know that they have a connection to a moral issue so an example of that might be the united farm workers boycott which is very popular beginning in the late 1960s through the 70s for many decades thereafter. in 1971, there was an article in the new york new -- "new york times" estimating more than 17 million americans

agented in solidarity with the boycott, and the idea of that boycott was not to harm the grape and lettuce growers in california, but to really raise awareness of the problems that migrant workers faced, the very, very bad work conditions, the dangerous conditions, unhealthy conditions, and to get americans to be concerned about something that most people, when you go into a grocery store, your grapes or lettuce looks tbiewfl. you don't think about the connections between now and the person who grew those and the pesticides that might be harming them and their children, and the whole idea of that boy colt was to get americans to think about that, and i think that was an example of the boycott that succeeded more at the political level than the economic level. one of the things the internet has done was made it easier for people to get together across big distances own organize boycotts and other forms of consumer movements.

if you look online, you discover hundreds of boycotts going on as we speak. every year or two, there's a boycott that captures the american imagination, sometimes for a brief period, other times for a longer period, and it is a way that americans continue to exstress their political views. >> would the occupy movement -- >> next, take a look the the south carolina center for children's books and literacy with executive director, kim. booktv visited columbia, south carolina with our local partner, time warner cable. >> we are at the south carolina center for children's books and literacy at the university of south carolina, and we are an outreach of the school of library and information science, and we do several things here. we are the state's examination collection for children's and

young adult literature meaning we get publications first, and we look at them as librarians and evaluate them. what's the new trends in publishing? how can they be used in classrooms? what libraries would be interested in them? we work with college students, who are going to be teachers and librarians, and we work with the professionals in the field, librarians, teachers, and parents, how to incorporate good children's literature into whatever it is they do. the south carolina center for children's literacy started as a book shelf at the school here to evaluate new materials. it was called the best center, and it was started by faculty as a part of the college, and it was really about probably 30 years old. now, 12 years ago, the initiative started to grow, and in 2005, the name was changed to the south carolina center for children's books and literacy, and as you see, there's a

beautiful space here right in downtown columbia, and right now, we have 8200 titles, and like i said before, all of the titles are continuing to change so it's an interesting rotating collection. we decided to form a new series as a part of the university press called young books, namedded that, obviously, because we are the palmetto state, but we didn't want to exclude anybody, birth to age 18, opening it up to children's picture books, open it up to poetry, young adult, historical fiction and nonfiction, and everything in our series has to be educational in nature. it has to fit the larger mission of the university press so we wanted to just give all of our great authors and illustrators in south carolina the opportunity to publish through a well-known and well-respected publisher, the university press, and then for us to say these are the stories in south carolina that are not told. young paw met toe books is different and unique because we don't know of any other

university presses that are doing children and young adult materials. now, we know a few published young adult materials in the past, so we thought what a neat opportunity to do this and sort of set a precedent for publishing for children and young adults. we're excited. the first is called "fragments of the arts," a young adult, historical fiction novel about the life of robert smalls, one of my favorite civil war figures. he was from south carolina, was a slave, and his story's just remarkable, and he really helped shape what it is today, and so i love that that's the first piece. anybody interested in submitting app idea to us would submit to us a full man knew script of a picture book with a suggested illustration plan, they don't need to be finished, but a plan for what they might be like. what happens is all submissions come to me, and our editorial board decides this is our mission as young palmetto books,

and how is that important part of the series? if we approve it, approve it as a group, it goes to the regular university press process, out for independent peer reviews, then comes back to the press, and as a package, we'll present it to the larger university press board for approval. right now, we have six titles that have been through all of the those steps, so we have six things that are in some stage of in production, some step of the production process. both the university press and the south carolina center for children's books and literacy are a part of the university in south carolina, and different parts of the programs are funded by different sours. much of what we fund is through grants and gifts and always looking for more partners in the endeavors, and primarily, the university press and the school of library information science are supporting young palmetto books. well, i think the center and now young palmetto books is of interest to anybody anywhere because we are publishing books,

south carolina, but then also about interesting stories that are part of all of our history. it's interesting to say how can we write a nonfiction book, maybe by a south carolina author, but that is going to be interesting to everyone that still sort of focuses on our state? the center is open to the public. anyone in the state of south carolina can use it. primarily, the university of south carolina students use it, students who are undergraduates who will be teachers or librarians. we have a lot of graduate students in the school of information science who use it, and we also serve teachers and librarians all over the state. we have librarians from the upstate who come in and say, okay, i have the budget next year, what's new, what do i want to purchase? how do i use them in the book club? we have those who talk about how do you use different methods in outreach. teachers come and work with us on curriculum saying do a unit

on poetry. what do you have that's not the same stuff that we have in the libraries that we've had for years and years? we have parents who say, you know, you have interesting things that we don't maybe see at the public or school library, and they'll come and talk to me about my son who is a hesitant reader or my daughter really loves this type of book. we one-on-one work with them on book selection in helping them get the right things. we have also the research component. we have students, ph.d. level students and faculty doing research. our university has children's literature programs as a part of several different colleges, which is interesting. we teach and do research on children's literature in the school of information and science, the college of education, and the department of english. we have folks across the board who are using children's literature and that literature then to go into other areas of research. i think the future of the center is going to be very exciting.

we are continuing to grow very, very quickly. we are adding technology to our outreach program, which i'm very excited about, and i think that's a wonderful fit for young palmetto books because it's also coming out in e-book format. we'll add all the family literal sigh programs, working with families all over the state on a multigenerational literacy initiative. we're excited about that. as the center, we continue to grow and make new partnerships. excited where that takes us in terms of impact on south carolina on a very, very large scale. what i think is so fascinating and interesting about this is that everything we do, all of these initiatives, which are quite broad, are all based on good children's literature, and sometimes we don't realize the importance of that and of those stories. >> booktv recently visited columbia, south carolina with the help of our local partner, time warner cable.

in south carolina's most populated city and state capital, the area has had a rich history, particularly, during the civil war. columbia was decided the succession convention in 1860 marking the departure of the first state from the union, and in 1865, the capital was captured by general william t. sherman, and 30% of the city was destroyed. >> mary chestnut was one of the most famous women of the 19th century. he was an author. she was the wife of a u.s. senator who resigned his senate seat when abraham lincoln was elected, and he came home to south carolina and became an aid to camp of confederate president jefferson davis, and throughout the war, she kept a diary, and it's one of the most famous accounts of the civil war. there are about 70,000 books

written about the civil war, and hers is probably one of the three most important. not only for its own literary value, but because she was there. it's -- it's source material. it's referenced in almost every his tore -- his tore yap's book about the civil war. the book i wrote about mary chestnut is a two-volume book, which for the first times reunites 200 of the photographs that she collected with her diary, we're certain now was the intention all along, but she gave them to a niece, these photographs, and they were lost. they were lost somewhere in 1930 when her niece died, and they van fished for 80 years. we found them on ebay and bought them at auction and gave them back to the university of south carolina's library where they are now reunited with.

we wrote the book to show she was so ahead of her time in what she was really creating was not just a written history, but a visual history, and the collection of photographs is not just the heros, but the pan camera of the world that she saw. the crown heads of europe, the foreign ministers, the abolitionists, the new york newspaper, editors, everyday people. she was really writing like the epic. she was creating it, an epic on all the letters that a classic epic is, which is the destruction of the society, story of the political intrigue of war, the everyday life, the music, the poetry, the hymns, the everyday people packed all

into the diary. remember he was not read until 1900. she called her diaries my treasure, and she kept them throughout the war, and then she came home to a ruined civilization, kept on writing, and she revised them, 5,000 pages, four deplete revisions, and then she gave them to a schoolteacher friend of hers in columbia who placed them under an amoir for 20 years and finally decided to publish them. when they were published first in 1905, every library in the south had a copy. her firsthand account of going through the tragedy, the national tragedy of the war, was a woman's perspective and enlightened perspective about race relations and human rights, women's rights, has become one

of the most popular books ever known about the civil war. she had a front row seat on all of history. her family, her husband's family were union men. they were not in favor of the secession of south carolina, and she loved her years in washington, and she loved observing and writing about all of the fascinating people she met there, and when her husband resigned his senate seat, she wrote, i do not at all resign, came home, had to leave washington, and then they were in the thick of it. her husband helped draft the confederate constitution. he was in richmond as an aid camp to jefferson davis. she was one of davis' closest friends, so she saw all of the

politics and the certainly conflict of a newly formed nation that was totally unprepared to do what it did, and, of course, failed. she saw that they had no army. they had no currency. they had no structure. they were completely -- they were fool hardy to do this, and she stayed there in the hotel where the evenings were filled with the comings and going of the famous generals and famous military leaders, and she was constraintly writing down everything she heard them say and everything her husband told her when he came home so she could see the inner turmoil of what was going on as well, the fractious relationships between the political tear leaders. my great, great grandmother, engraving for all of us in the

generations thereafter, we're part of a culture, a southern culture, that are essentially celtic story tellers. we have a deep connection to the land, a deep fascination and love of stories, and when the civil war wiped out 50 years of the south and a generation of men, one of the few things that survived was this determined effort to keep family together through letters, communications, holding on to the old family home, and for me what's fascinating is that i can find in the family letters the women who anchored family life, such second class citizens in the 19th century. a lady wouldn't even have her

photographs in the newspaper other than a small o pitch richmond when she died. they held it together, kept families together, and managed to survive and farm. some of them were farmers and teachers after the war, even though they'd never worked. my favorite part of this is handing on to my children and grandchildren, particularly the daughters and granddaughters this sense of courage and engagement with life that they felt going through so much hardship, and that they've left a story for us to treasure and add on to. >> now on booktv, more from the recent trip to south carolina. columbia, located in the center safety, lies at the con fliewns of the broad rivers. the two merge to form the congress rei river. it was settled by europeans in the early 1700s and chartered as a city in 1854.

>> this is the basin, the green heart of south carolina. the book was written to exemplify the basin, which is an acronym for the three rivers that make up the basin. the cowasee basin is 215,000 acres running from columbia down the river down to approximately lone star, and it runs down the waterway from camden, and two rivers connect ten miles below where we sit now and runs on down. the book really has three major themes. there's the ecological and bilogical theme, the historical and cultural theme, and it's got the gee geographical theme. we wanted the book to depict the cowasee basin as we saw it, and

to educate people about it, and provide a permanent form of education about the cowasee basin. we'll go from here to goodwill plantation. it was a working antebellum plantation. while there, we put a boat in colonel's creek, up the creek to old mill pond, we go to cook's mountain. you get a vista, a panorama, you see long distances, and it'll surprise you when we get there. the 1200 acres on this farm. we describe a working forest which means we do, on occasion, harvested. one of the things that's really amazing is how fast trees grow in the south. we do prescribed fires, and this -- these woods here were burned intentionally with the

prescribed fire last winter, and winter after next would be scheduled to come back through here with fire again. every third year. this is all part of the managedded forest here, and some of these pines are natural regeneration, but some we planted ourselves. i'm larry faulkner, a member of the land trust in the cowasee basin. this was named goodwill in the late 17 00s and daniel was a member of the first continental congress of the country, and when he retired from congress, he moved to goodwill, and lived here until his death. we have 37 historical sites on goodwill. that's berry road, and most don't realize in the 1700s, there was a ferry here operated by garp e and he livedded here on goodwill. 99% of the people in columbia

don't put that connection together. this is one of the most historical tracks of land in central south carolina, and not many people know it. we're standing in front of the hayward house that was build in 1858 by eb and charles hayward. in the civil war, the haywards were the largest slave holders in the united states, and so they moved all their slives from the coast to goodwill. if you drive into goodwill, you drive in the same way that over 12,000 slaves walk -- 2,000 slaved walked in to goodwill in the civil war. in 1863, the county records show there were 976 slaves that taxes were paid on, but records that we have showed there were over 2,000 here. we're standing in front of two of the original slave cabins that remain at goodwill, and when they came to goodwill to

tell the slaves that they were free, he had the chief driver go over to plantation and have all the slaves come to this point, took two to three hours to get them all here, but they all gathered here, and they told them they were free. the reaction of the slaves was somewhat surprising. they just milled around for hour or so, and they were told to go on home, go to bed, prepare to go to work the next morning. this water wheel was browghts here in the 1700s by daniel, cast iron water wheel, a mill here for grinding, a grises mill for grinding corn and wheat or whatever else may might have for food. we're inside the mill house at goodwill. the water wheel outside that powers our hayward corn mills here, most of this equipment in here was purchased in the

1800s by pt, so we have the water wheel power and hayward corn mill. this is the corn mill, we have the cover off of it. this is the top stone. there's a stone in the bottom. they are stationary. there's another stone. this is the top stone that turns. this device lowers the top stone down, and when you're grinding, you always lower the top stone down until you hear it touch the bottom, and then you back off to whatever, you know, grit that you want to grind. this is the device to lower that stone. >> we now at the mill pond on goodillustrators -- goodwill plantation, preparing for a boat cruise up colonel's creek. >> we're in colonel's creek

which provide the the water, the mill pond to use the water for power to run the mill house we just saw. the mill pond was build in the early 1800s. this was the water sorts for that mill, which was the heart beat of the whole plantation. colonel's creek is a major con tributary of the river, one of the three rivers that make up the cowasee. this is a major con transcribe trair. the best well-known one that frequented the area was frap sis mare yon, a swamp fox, a revolutionary war hero, did a lot of squirmishing in the area of south carolina. he was known as a swamp fox because he would hit the british kind of in almost gorilla like and escape into the swamp, and they couldn't find him so he was dubbed the swamp fox. in the area was the town of sumter named from him.

the british and the continental army came through this area on the way to the battle of camden at the ruer -- burrow house. on the way to battle of camden, and weeks after that, greene, the southern continue thenal army commander had his troops there, and all of this within a couple miles of where we are right now. very interesting piece of revolutionary history. a real notable came through then, 1540, and that was her nan doe desoto, early explorer, but he came right up the side of the river, and in search of indian gold, traveled from roughly the con fluns up the west side of the water to the town of what is now camden. we're getting ready to go now to cook's mountain. ehighest

points in the cowasee basin. the altitude here is 374 feet. the altitude at the river is roughly a hundred feet, basically the e qif lend of a 27-story building rises right up out of the river swamp. it's my understanding that it is land that washed away around it as opposed to a regular mountain that rised up from underneath. the significance is geographical, but the fact it's so large in what is mostly surrounded by lowlands. ..