Video
Veterans recall Leyte Island in the Philippines and describe their experiences there in detail. They also provide reflections on the starving Philippine children, as well as adults, and they recall...
Video
With Japan's navy in ruins, America unleashed its air forces. Our veterans describe their experiences, their training, and the aircraft they flew.
Video
One of our veterans recalls the bombing of Iwo Jima, and going below to his quarters to get a little sleep. He opened his Bible and it fell open to the 91st Psalm, which he reads. Our veterans discuss...
Video
Veterans recall the brutality of war with the Japanese, their allegiance to their emperor, the tropical heat, the jungle, the danger of the rocky reefs, and the threat of malaria, for which they took...
Video
Women discuss serving in the WAVES, the SPARS, the WACS, the WAFS, and the WASPS. All the services needed women during this period. Our women veterans remember many of the details of their service...
Video
Midway Island was a U.S. outpost located about a thousand miles west of Hawaii. Prior to World War II, it was basically a weather station with some U.S. Naval groups on it to protect it. The Japanese...
Video
Fritz Hamer, military historian, explains that Japan was an industrial power, but it needed the resources to maintain it. Japan's purpose was to nullify the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, then destroy the...
Video
The island of Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, was the major offensive area for the Japanese, in order to control Australia and the South Pacific. Veterans and historians reflect on...
Video
Veterans recall what life onboard a Navy ship was like, including being bored, being seasick, how crowded they were, the schedule, poker and Monopoly, gambling, learning to drink, including some...
Photo
This engraving, also from the 1785 Henry Mouzon map cartouche shows all the main steps in the production of indigo. The plants were harvested in bundles before the stems became woody, then immediately...
Photo
Workers in the fields harvest the indigo plant during the hot summer months. Engraving from a French book, around 1760. Indigo was a good complement to rice as a crop. Indigo grew well in the high...
Photo
Beginning in 1740, experiments by Eliza Lucas (who later married Charles Pinckney - see Charles Pinckney's Town House) led to the successful cultivation of indigo, the source of a rich blue dye so...
Photo
African-American workers thresh rice with a flail around 1910, a technique that is probably African in its origins. Lowcountry planters in colonial South Carolina sought out slaves from the Rice Coast...
Photo
An Alice Huger Ravenel Smith watercolor of African-American workers loading rice on a ship to send to market. Note the use of "head-toting" as a way of moving the heavy rice sacks. Courtesy of the...
Photo
Workers on the Hobcaw Barony plantation around 1900 are "pounding rice the hard way," according to the caption. This pounding system is African in origin. The blows loosen the husks from the rice...
Photo
Winnowing house on the Mansfield Plantation in Georgetown County. Rice was brought into the upper story of the winnowing house, and was slowly sifted through a hole in the floor. As the heavier...
Photo
Winnowing rice with a fanner basket near Beaufort, in 1907. The sweet grass baskets now sold as decorative items in Charleston area open air markets were originally essential pieces of home and field...
Photo
Harvesting rice, using modern methods and a tractor. Photo by Stan Lewis, around 1950. Courtesy of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.
Photo
"A rice raft with plantation hands, near Georgetown." From a Keystone View Company stereograph card, around 1890. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
Photo
A watercolor by Alice Huger Ravenel Smith of workers flooding the rice fields. Courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association.
Photo
Flooding a rice field at high tide. From Keystone View Company stereograph card, around 1890. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
Photo
A stereograph card shows hoeing rice "the old way." Hoe culture was the predominant method of working the soil in traditional agricultural societies, and was only slowly replaced by the use of mule...
Photo
Plowing rice. Engraving from "Harper's New Monthly Magazine," November 1878. Courtesy of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.
Photo
Alice Huger Ravenel Smith painted a number of watercolor scenes of the rice cultivation process in the Lowcountry at the turn of the 20th century. The process had not changed substantially since it...
Photo
Co-op hog shipment day at Kingstree, Williamsburg County, in February 1937. Cooperatives were encouraged in the New Deal, through loans from the Farm Security Administration, as a means of helping...
Photo
James Alford, Ernest Staton, and Bright Stevenson work in the interior of the Staton Dairy barn in Darlington County around 1923. Courtesy of the Darlington County Historical Commission.
Photo
Mr. and Mrs. W.P. Roof, Sr., pose with their hired hand Dick Portee, around 1900. The livestock they exhibit in the farm yard behind their Lexington house were proudly included in the photograph as...
Photo
Turkey processing at the Louis Rich Poultry plant in Newberry. Photo by Doug Gilmore, February 12, 1988. Courtesy of "The State" newspaper.
Photo
The Palmetto Pigeon Plant in Sumter, photographed November 28, 1932. Courtesy of the Sumter County Museum Archives.
Photo
Squabs were an important commercial poultry product for Midlands farmers. Here a group of African-American women pick feathers from squabs headed for market in Sumter. Photograph by Bill King, for the...