RPI

Discover how Huck's Defeat spurred on the South Carolina militiamen to future victories during the Revolutionary War.

In July of 1780, when the Revolutionary War in the Southern states seemed doomed to failure, a small but important battle took place on James Williamson's plantation in what is now York County, South Carolina. The Battle of Williamson's Plantation, or Huck's Defeat as it later came to be known, laid the groundwork for the vicious partisan warfare waged by the militiamen on the Carolina frontier against the superior forces of the British Army, and it paved the way for the calamitous defeats that the British suffered at Hanging Rock, Musgrove's Mill, Kings Mountain, Blackstock's Plantation and Cowpens, all in the South Carolina backcountry. In this groundbreaking new study, historian Michael C. Scoggins provides an in-depth account of the events that unfolded in the Broad and Catawba River valleys of upper South Carolina during the critical summer of 1780. Drawing extensively on first-person accounts and military correspondence, much of which has never been published before, Scoggins tells a dramatic story that begins with the capture of an entire American army at Charleston in May and ends with a resounding series of Patriot victories in the Carolina Piedmont during the late summer of 1780-—victories that set Lord Cornwallis and the British Army irrevocably on the road to defeat and to surrender at Yorktown in October 1781.

The Nurse Midwife Who Transformed the South

Discover the true story of Maude Callen, South Carolina’s pioneering Black nurse-midwife, who brought life-saving healthcare to the rural South from 1923 to 1990. When Callen arrived in Pineville by mule-drawn wagon, she left behind Savannah’s social elite for a world of poverty, disease, and loss. But she stayed—changing lives one birth, one patient, one home visit at a time.

In 1951, Life magazine featured her work in a moving photo essay by W. Eugene Smith, awakening the nation to her quiet heroism. Donations poured in, and Callen’s legacy grew.

Award-winning journalist Lindsay Street brings Callen’s story to life with rich historical detail, rare archival materials, and Callen’s own words. This inspiring biography is a must-read for lovers of Black history, Southern history, and untold stories of American medical pioneers.

Perfect for readers who cherish deeply human stories of perseverance, service, and courage.

A paradise for pirates? A strategic military outpost? A holding area for enslaved Africans? A tourist attraction? Daufuskie Island is all of that and more.

Daufuskie, a Muscogee word meaning sharp feather or land with a point, is an island located between Hilton Head and Savannah, and with no bridge to the mainland, the island maintains a distinct allure. Once home to Native American tribes, then an island hideaway for pirates, and then a strategic military outpost, the darkest chapter in Daufuskie's history saw plantation owners hold enslaved Africans as chattel to build their wealth. After the Civil War and occupation by Union soldiers, freed slaves from the Sea Islands and surrounding states settled on Daufuskie as landowners and sharecroppers. Daufuskie's population fluctuated in keeping with local industries, and those who stayed often relied on farming, hunting, and fishing to survive. Electricity was only brought to the island in the early 1950s, and the first telephone rang in 1972. Today, historic sites, restaurants, outdoor recreation, and scenic beauty draw visitors and residents to this unique community. Daufuskie Island is part of the National Park Service's Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Through historic postcards discover how Hilton Head Island went from a relatively dormant community to a renowned tourist destination.

English explorer Capt. William Hilton found the island and named Hilton Head after himself in 1663. After the Civil War was over, the island was relatively dormant for almost 100 years. The biggest event of the 20th century was the installation of electricity in 1950. Soon after, tourism to the area started when the Sea Crest Motel opened in 1955. In 1956, the James F. Byrnes Bridge was built, and the first grocery store opened near Coligny Plaza. Developer Charles Fraser visualized an environmentally friendly residential community and named it Sea Pines Plantation. Sea Pines Plantation wrote its first sales contract in 1958, and Fraser’s formula has since been copied around the world. In 1969, the Heritage Classic golf tournament set the island on a path to being nationally known. 

Nelle Smith and Ora Smith, who arrived on the island in 1963, were true pioneers. They coauthored the book Paradise: Memories of Hilton Head Island in the Early Days, a historical memoir. Ora is a self-proclaimed archivist of modern Hilton Head historical documents. The postcards in the book are from their private collection of the modern era of the island. 

Those Who Fought for Liberty On Both Sides

In 1775, the people of Charleston were on the verge of eight years of revolution and war. They were bitterly divided. For Charlestonians, the War for Independence was a civil war, as some favored independence and some were Loyalists. Many on both sides contributed greatly to the war effort. They were famous and obscure, rich and poor, women and men, Black and white. Contrary to popular opinion, people on both sides appealed to patriotism and fought for liberty. For the enslaved majority, the war represented an opportunity to gain their freedom—by siding with the British. In telling the stories of a spectrum of participants, Peter McCandless recovers a history at odds with public memory, encrusted with layers of forgetfulness and myths.

Charleston, 1775–1783: where loyalty was as dangerous as rebellion.

Revisit the Revolutionary War through the eyes of Charleston’s most misunderstood figures, the Loyalists. Often erased from more traditional narratives, these men and women lived in the deadliest gray space of the war, where allegiance shifted by necessity, survival outweighed ideology, and every decision carried life-and-death consequences.

Featuring more than eighty rare and striking historic images, this book reconstructs Charleston as a high-stakes garrison town: a city of spies, secret networks, and double agents—one operating directly under General Nathanael Greene himself. Drawn from newly examined primary sources and firsthand accounts, the story exposes the covert war beneath the battlefield, where Patriots and Loyalists often moved indistinguishably through the same streets, salons, and homes.

Beyond the fighting, the narrative follows the war’s long shadow into post-Revolutionary South Carolina, where confiscation, exile, and political vengeance threatened to tear the region apart. Why did iconic Patriot leaders like Henry Laurens, Francis Marion, and Nathanael Greene intervene to restore seized Loyalist estates? And how did those decisions quietly shape the foundation of reconciliation in the new republic?

At the heart of the story are the women of Loyalist Charleston, forced out of the domestic sphere and into the raw machinery of power. Their petitions before the state legislature—pleas for property, protection, and survival.

Authors Kathy Roe Coker and Jason Wetzel detail the these stories and more in a riveting account of loyalty and struggle.

A vivid portrait of power, privilege, and peril in colonial Charleston.

Eighteenth Century Charleston was a city built on water, wealth, and whispers—where the harbor brimmed with merchant ships and war vessels, and status was measured in wharves, wine cellars, imported porcelain, and family names that could open every door. This is colonial Charleston at its peak: a thriving Atlantic port fueled by rice and indigo, shaped by transatlantic trade, and held together by tightly woven kinship networks that blurred the line between commerce and political power.

At the center is Rebecca Brewton Motte—born into privilege, married into influence, and forced by fire, disease, and revolution to become far more than a genteel figure in a drawing room. Through the interconnected worlds of the Brewtons, Mottes, Pinckneys, and their allies, the story reveals how South Carolina’s elite built fortunes, constructed iconic townhouses, navigated epidemics and natural disasters, and managed sprawling plantations with enslaved labor powering every “luxury” detail.

But this is not a postcard version of the past. Alongside elegant architecture and consumer culture sits the raw reality of colonial life: malaria, yellow fever, smallpox, hurricanes, legal constraints on women, and the destabilizing pressure of war and British occupation. Moving from Charleston’s grand streets to backcountry plantations, this biography-driven history shows how one woman’s life illuminates the larger machinery of colonial South Carolina, the American Revolution, and the fragile world that made—and nearly unmade—an Atlantic empire. Historian and author Alexia Helsley details this remarkable history.