The Historical Commission of South Carolina pamphlet collection is comprised of 45 artificially bound volumes of separately published South Carolina imprints from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Topics covered include: agriculture, Civil War regimental histories, education and schools, geology, industry, medicine, Native American tribes, nature, nullification, the Revolutionary War, the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877), and the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition (1901-1902).

The Negro Travelers’ Green Book was a travel guide series published from 1936 to 1964 by Victor H. Green. It was intended to provide African American motorists and tourists with the information necessary to board, dine, and sightsee comfortably and safely during the era of segregation.

During the late 19th century the discovery of phosphate deposits in the Charleston and Florence areas marked the beginning of a rapidly growing industry in South Carolina. Phosphates are rocks formed from the fossilized remains of sea creatures found in areas once covered by oceans. In South Carolina, phosphates were used as fertilizers to extend the life of crops. Freedmen flocked toward the industry seeking employment, and with the financial support of Northern financiers, Carolina farmers began production of this highly sought-after material. Soon after the introduction of the phosphate industry, the popular market collapsed due to an over-saturated market. After only twenty years of production, the phosphate industry was essentially over for South Carolina. Long-since ended, signs of the briefly successful industry still exist in Charleston in road names and signs of geological incursion.

Charles Crosland (1845-1918), who served in the 19th South Carolina Cavalry Battalion, with Company H of the Confederate Army's Hampton Legion, recounts his combat experiences, his father's death, and the destruction of the Crosland family plantation in Bennetsville. He also references the sinking of the USS Housatonic by the Confederate submarine, the H.L. Hunley. Lula Crosland Ricaud later reproduced the book in part in her Family of Edward and Ann Snead Crosland, published in 1958.

Originally conceived in the late 18th Century, fire insurance maps provided structural and urban environmental information necessary for insurance underwriters. Included here are over 2000 Sanborn Maps of over eighty cities in South Carolina from 1884 - 1923 as well as over two hundred unpublished draft maps of additional cities in the state.

Andrews, with the assistance of some of his fellow soldiers, recalls the Company's combat experiences during the second Battle of Bull Run, Virginia (1862; also called Second Manassas) and the siege of Petersburg, Virginia (1864-1865), as well as his own capture and imprisonment at Point Lookout Prison Camp for Confederates in Maryland following the Battle of Fort Stedman. Andrews served as a private.

This collection includes A Story of Spartan Push: The Greatest Cotton Manufacturing Centre in the South: Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Its Resources by Edward P. McKissick and Spartanburg, City and County, South Carolina: Their Wonderful Attractions and Marvelous Advantages as a Place of Settlement, and for the Profitable Investment of Capital by the Spartanburg Board of Trade. The volume combines the first reprints of two early histories of the upstate's second largest city, detailing Spartanburg's economic and cultural resources in the 1890s.

Union postmaster Joseph H. Sears published the New South newspaper out of the post office building on Union Square in Port Royal, S.C., on a weekly basis beginning in March 1862. The paper was moved to the town of Beaufort sometime in 1865 and remained there until it ceased in 1867. The New South offers a glimpse into an era of unprecedented social upheaval in the South Carolina Low Country. The 64 issues available online are fully searchable and readable with the use of the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Welcome to one of the largest single author collections on the web, the William Gilmore Simms Digital Edition. Writing from Charleston and Barnwell District, South Carolina, as well as on trips across the South and to the North, he did more than anyone to frame white southern self-identity, nationalism, and historical consciousness. He also did more to foster the South's literary life and place in America's imagination. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, only James Fenimore Cooper was as popular, and Edgar Allan Poe in 1845 rated Simms "the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced." He was as well the South's most influential editor of cultural journals and was the region's most prolific critic and poet. Enjoy your exploration of his work and world, returning to examine new materials added since your last visit. For more detailed information about Simms's publications and their histories be sure to visit our parent site at the Simms Initiatives.