Many of the images in the three sections of the collection preceding this one ("Economic Activity in South Carolina,""Transportation in South Carolina," and "South Carolina Towns and Cities") are also about the everyday lives of ordinary people: the work they have done, the places they lived, the means by which they moved back and forth between home and work, or home and play. But this section is intended to focus particularly on the people themselves. The organization of this section is a mixture of category and chronology. Because South Carolinians have taken sports seriously, the first images here are of competitive sports. These are followed by images of outdoor recreation; of ceremonies, parades and demonstrations; of the making of music and of dancing, as well as other forms of the art of entertainment; of cooking and cleaning; of creating crafts. The final group of images is one of portraits: people in groups, and people as individuals. In some cases, we know their names. In many cases, we do not. For all, their smiles, their poses, their surroundings are memorable: from the anticipation of a group of teenagers about to board a bus for a trip, to the serenity of a young Civil War wife to travel to Charleston to see her soldier husband - these are all people to whom we respond in recognition and delight.
Photo of the Laurens Football Team circa 1909 courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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The Columbia All-Stars were an African-American professional baseball team. Photo by Walter Livingston Blanchard, ca. 1920. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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Motorcycle enthusiasts in front of the State House protest a proposal to make safety helmets mandatory for all motorcycle riders. Photo by Doug Gilmore, published October 1985. Courtesy of "The State"...
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William and Eliza Charlotte Moultrie, painted in 1792 by an unknown artist, were the grandchildren of General William Moultrie, the Revolutionary War defender of Sullivan's Island (see William...
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"Saturday Night," an etching by artist James F. Cooper (1907-1968) from the late 1930s, is probably a scene from Pawley's Island, where Cooper owned a beach house. "Saturday Night" is more than simply...
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An integrated group of African-Americans and whites (which was unusual in its time) gathers at a USO meeting on Harden Street operated by the YWCA around the time of the Second World War. The woman...
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A cast iron wash pot sits in the front yard of one of the houses on this Georgetown County plantation, photographed around 1900. Washday meant boiling the wash, wringing it out laboriously by hand...
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A baseball game on May Day Health Day at Ashwood Plantation. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
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A Berkeley County woman squeezes excess water out of her clean laundry by running clothes through a mechanical wringer. Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library.
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Anti-Klan parade and poster in Orangeburg. Todd Houston photo, February 1987. Courtesy of "The State" newspaper.
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Barbecue in its many forms is a tradition so important in South Carolina cuisine that regional variations in barbecue sauce were included in a recent geography of the state! Here, a St. Helena's...
