PODCAST · history
Charleston Time Machine
by Nic Butler, Ph.D.
Dr. Nic Butler, historian at the Charleston County Public Library, explores the less familiar corners of local history with stories that invite audiences to reflect on the enduring presence of the past in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
Episodes
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Episode 330: The Race to Save the USS Yorktown in the 1970s
The aircraft carrier Yorktown (CV-10) has been a landmark of Charleston Harbor for fifty years, but few visitors recall the struggle to secure the ship for South Carolina. The opening of a naval museum at Patriots Point in 1976 capped a years-long campaign, both to save the aging carrier from the...
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Episode 329: Free Judy's Place on Charleston Neck
Three hundred years ago, a Black woman called Judy cultivated a small farm within the sylvan landscape of suburban Charleston. Most residents of the present community have traversed her property without noticing its ancient boundaries, and few recognize her landmark name that endured for nearly a...
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Episode 328: The British Withdrawal from Charleston Harbor, January 1776
Lord William Campbell’s six-month struggle to uphold British authority in South Carolina collapsed during the final wintry days of 1775, but the tenacious royal governor did not concede defeat. His withdrawal to neighboring colonies in January 1776 marked a significant turning point in the…
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Episode 327: The American Raid on Sullivan's Island, 19 December 1775
Episode 327: The American Raid on Sullivan's Island, 19 December 1775 by Nic Butler, Ph.D.
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Episode 326: The Flight of Sarah Izard Campbell, December 1775
Lady William Campbell, formerly Miss Sarah Izard, endured three months’ separation from her husband during the autumn of 1775, thanks to the collapse of British authority in the capital of South Carolina. When allies warned that she might become a rebel hostage, Sarah entrusted her life and that…
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Episode 325: Raids, Reprisals, and Rebellion in December 1775
In early December 1775, anxiety about food security drove the king’s mariners in Rebellion Road to commit spiteful acts of plunder. Illegal seizures made on both land and sea fueled contempt for royal authority across South Carolina and inspired rebel leaders in Charleston to pursue an…
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Episode 324: The Return of the Scorpion in late 1775
The return of the sloop-of-war Scorpion to South Carolina in late November 1775 heightened rebel fears of an attack on Charleston, but the warship’s real mission was far less threatening. Rather than heralding the imminent arrival of reinforcements from England, the Scorpion delivered news that...
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Credits: 010
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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Victory Day in Charleston, December 14th, 1782: 009
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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Sampson Waldron: Ship Pilot Extraordinary: 008
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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Phebe Fletcher: A ‘Magdalene’ in Revolutionary Charleston: 007
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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The Liberty Tree in Revolutionary Charleston: 006
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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John Champneys and his Controversial Row: 005
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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The First Step towards Revolution, 21 April 1775: 004
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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Declaring Independence in 1776 Charleston: 003
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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Carolina Day: June 28th, 1776: 002
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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Introduction: 001
Featuring Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston Time Machine podcast, our latest Listening Booth series celebrates the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with short stories exploring Charleston's Revolutionary War history.
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Episode 323: Firefight in Hog Island Channel: South Carolina's Tipping Point to War with Britain
Episode 323: Firefight in Hog Island Channel: South Carolina's Tipping Point to War with Britain by Nic Butler, Ph.D.
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Episode 322: Sullivan's Island, October 1775: An Emergent Loyalist Sanctuary
The last vestiges of royal authority in South Carolina, huddled within two small warships anchored in Charleston Harbor, survived the autumn of 1775 by cultivating a largely forgotten terrestrial connection. Surrounded by increasingly hostile rebel forces, British mariners established a foothold…
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Episode 321: Posturing in Charleston Harbor, September 1775: Prelude to a Firefight
Episode 321: Posturing in Charleston Harbor, September 1775: Prelude to a Firefight by Nic Butler, Ph.D.
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Episode 320: The Collapse of British Rule in South Carolina, September 1775
One hundred and five years after the founding of modern South Carolina, the king’s royal governor dissolved the provincial government and fled the capital in mid-September 1775. Lord William Campbell’s famous nocturnal flight to the warship Tamar followed a sustained summer campaign of rebel...
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Episode 319: The Tamar in Rebellion Road: Asylum for Loyalists in 1775
Episode 319: The Tamar in Rebellion Road: Asylum for Loyalists in 1775 by Nic Butler, Ph.D.
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Episode 318: The Flight of Sampson the Pilot in the Summer of 1775
In the summer of 1775, amid smoldering tension between the British government rebellious colonists, officers of the Royal Navy in Charleston quietly negotiated with an enslaved mariner named Sampson Waldron. The warship Scorpion briefly required his piloting skills to exit the harbor, but the...
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Episode 317: The First Days of South Carolina's Last Royal Governor
Lord William Campbell, the new royal governor of the colony of South Carolina, stepped ashore at Charleston in late June 1775 to an uneasy reception. Family, friends, and old acquaintances greeted him politely, but a pervasive spirit of rebellion clouded their sentiments. Insulted by apathy for…
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Episode 316: Governor William Campbell and the Scorpion, sailing to Charleston in 1775
The first sparks of the American Revolution ignited during the spring of 1775, while Lord William Campbell prepared to sail from England to his post as Governor of South Carolina. His contacts and conversations during that turbulent year presaged an uncertain reception in Charleston. As civil war...
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Episode 315: Lord William Campbell, Sarah Izard, and their Carolina Connection, Part 2
The newlyweds, Lord and Lady William Campbell, settled in England after their 1763 marriage in Charleston, but the young couple actively nurtured familial connections to South Carolina over the course of the ensuing decade. Political, financial, and naval alliances made during the 1760s, followed...
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Episode 314: Lord William Campbell, Sarah Izard, and their Carolina Connection, Part 1
In the late winter of 1763, a young British officer sailed into Charleston Harbor aboard a warship assigned to protect the trade of a flourishing colony. Weeks later, Captain Lord William Campbell married a local heiress, Sarah Izard, and became invested in the slave-owning community. Their hasty...
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Episode 313: The 1775 Debut of the South Carolina Flag
In the autumn of 1775, rebellious South Carolinians raised a distinctive new flag over a waterfront fort just seized from British hands. Their commanding officer later described the creation of the state’s enduring banner in his memoir, but did not recall the date of its unveiling. Across...
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Episode 312: The Demise of Butcher Town and the Charleston Abattoir
The enclave known as Butcher Town flourished around Cannon’s millpond until 1850, when the expansion of Charleston’s city limits propelled the slaughtering business northward. The migration of butchers’ pens across the Neck then triggered a decades-long battle between private enterprise and…
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Episode 311: The Path to Butcher Town, Charleston's Slaughtering Suburb
The residents of early Charleston lived cheek-by-jowl with the animals they consumed, and routinely witnessed cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats trotting through urban streets to meet the butcher’s blade. Efforts to push this bloody business out of the city center commenced in the late 1690s and...
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Episode 310: Charleston's Centre Market, Established 1807
In the spring of 1807, nineteen years after the initial creation of Market Street, Charleston’s municipal government faced a looming deadline to complete the proposed but long-delayed public marketplace. To avoid a second forfeiture of the extensive property donated by generous neighbors, City...
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Episode 309: The Restoration of Market Street, 1804–1807
Amidst another influx of French-speaking refugees in the spring of 1804, Charleston’s municipal authorities negotiated with property owners to resuscitate the Market Street plan scuttled more than a decade earlier. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the project’s principal donor, dictated new terms to...
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Episode 308: Meandering Marketplaces in Urban Charleston, 1794–1805
Following the conversion of the city’s new Beef Market into a dormitory in the autumn of 1793, the business of vending fresh provisions in Charleston meandered across the urban landscape for more than a decade. The older marketplaces in Tradd and Queen Streets absorbed most of the central-city...
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Episode 307: The Refugees in Market Street, 1793
The legal foundation of Market Street, created in 1788, dissolved in 1793 when the City of Charleston scrambled to address a refugee crisis that shocked the community. Few in the Palmetto City today recall how a revolutionary struggle for civil rights in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola sparked…
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Episode 306: The Genesis of Market Street, 1783–1789
Market Street and its venerable public buildings exemplify the spirit of preservation and resilience in modern Charleston, but forgotten details of the site’s creation in the late eighteenth century shroud a troubled genesis. The city’s broadest thoroughfare was mostly underwater during its early...
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Episode 305: The Waterfront Markets of Colonial Charleston
In the spring of 1751, Governor James Glen described the Cooper River as “a kind of floating market,” hosting “numbers of canoes boats and pettyaguas that ply incessantly, bringing down the country produce to town.” In today’s Time Machine, let’s follow those watercraft to a series of market…
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Episode 304: The Rise of Asphalt Roadways in Twentieth-Century Charleston
Modern travelers across the city and county of Charleston roll across a continuous ribbon of asphalt that facilitates an expanding cycle of population growth and cultural diversity. The roots of this blacktop conveyor belt extend back more than century, when a series of obscure political changes...
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Episode 303: The Granite Roadways of Gilded-Age Charleston
During the twilight years of the nineteenth century, radical changes to local thoroughfares helped the City of Charleston evolve from a declining seaport into a tidy modern metropolis. Uniform blocks of durable granite displaced most of the city’s lumpy cobblestone streets during the 1880s, after...
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Episode 302: Reconstructing the Streets of Post-Civil War Charleston
Amidst the financial doldrums that followed the American Civil War, Charlestonians struggled to reconstruct their politics, rebuild their economy, and repair a neglected streetscape. Budget constraints compelled officials of the late 1860s and 1870s to perpetuate old-fashioned paving habits and…
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Episode 301: Cobbling the Streets of Antebellum Charleston
Charleston’s cobblestone streets fascinate residents and visitors alike, inspiring visions of pirates and horse-drawn carriages rattling through ye olde colonial capital. Imported from Europe as ship ballast since the 1670s, these roundish stones provided the city’s earliest street covering, but...
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Episode 300: Frederick Douglass in 1888 Charleston
Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was a towering figure in the history of the United States, occupying the vanguard of the nation’s struggle for African-American civil rights during the nineteenth century. Near the end of his celebrated career, Douglass visited Charleston in the spring of 1888 as…
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Episode 299: The Orange Economy of Colonial Charleston
Orange trees and their delicious fruit are not native to North America, but they form a curious and poorly-remembered chapter in South Carolina’s early history. During the second quarter of the eighteenth century, British settlers planted thousands of orange trees in the Charleston area to...
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Episode 298: Illuminating the Streets of Early Charleston
Can you imagine navigating the streets and roads of Charleston County between dusk and dawn without the aid of street lamps? The earliest inhabitants of this area relied on moonlight to guide their steps at night, but a campaign to provide nocturnal illumination commenced in the third quarter of...
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Episode 297: Giving Thanks for Native American Food in 1670 Charleston
Thanksgiving, an American holiday rooted in harvest celebrations, acknowledges the bounty of food so many of us take for granted. This tradition in South Carolina recalls the meals shared by English adventurers who landed at Albemarle Point in 1670. They arrived with modest supplies of perishable...
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Episode 296: Charleston Common: A Brief History of A Fractured Landscape
The place-name “Charleston Common” applies to a large swath of land reserved for public use since 1735. Conscious that the provincial capital lacked a traditional English common, South Carolina’s colonial government designated approximately eighty-five acres abutting the Ashley River for the...
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Episode 295: Mutiny and Murder aboard Nuestra Señora de la Concepçion, Part 4
The trial of Hispanic carpenter Joseph Lortia, accused of confederating with pirates aboard the Cuban schooner Nuestra Señora, unfolded through a series of episodes within South Carolina’s executive Council Chamber in July 1734. Conflicting testimony from the survivors recounted Lortia’s odd...
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Episode 294: Mutiny and Murder aboard Nuestra Señora de la Concepçion, Part 3
The young Cuban widow, Doña Petrona de Castro, suffered in the shadows during the first half of this story, but moved to center stage after the bloodied vessel Nuestra Señora docked in Charleston. When her disheveled treasure came ashore in late June 1734, the pregnant lady’s plight attracted the...
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Episode 293: Mutiny and Murder aboard Nuestra Señora de la Concepçion, Part 2
The terrified survivors of a murderous mutiny aboard the Cuban schooner Nuestra Señora sailed from the Bahamas under the command of a hired English pilot in mid-June 1734. They sought to return to Havana with no questions asked, but the crew’s curious behavior alerted the new captain to mortal...
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Episode 292: Mutiny and Murder aboard Nuestra Señora de la Concepçion, Part 1
An affluent Cuban merchant and his young pregnant wife set sail from Havana in May 1734 on a peaceful voyage to Hispaniola aboard their private schooner, but a piratical mutiny at sea claimed many lives and set the vessel adrift. Aided by a passing Bahamian mariner, the Nuestra Señora de la...
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Episode 291: Line Street: Vestige of the War of 1812
Line Street isn’t the most glamorous thoroughfare in the City of Charleston, but it recalls a significant episode in the community’s history. During the darkest days of the War of 1812 with Britain, thousands of men and women—both enslaved and free—rushed to construct a zigzag line of...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Dr. Nic Butler, historian at the Charleston County Public Library, explores the less familiar corners of local history with stories that invite audiences to reflect on the enduring presence of the past in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
HOSTED BY
Nic Butler, Ph.D.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Charleston Time Machine have?
Charleston Time Machine currently has 339 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Charleston Time Machine about?
Dr. Nic Butler, historian at the Charleston County Public Library, explores the less familiar corners of local history with stories that invite audiences to reflect on the enduring presence of the past in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.
How often does Charleston Time Machine release new episodes?
Charleston Time Machine publishes regularly with 339 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Charleston Time Machine?
You can listen to Charleston Time Machine on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Charleston Time Machine?
Charleston Time Machine is created and hosted by Nic Butler, Ph.D..
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