In mid-April of 1926, a professional dancer from Brooklyn named Bee Jackson paid a brief but memorable visit to the Charleston area. Highlights of that event were captured in professionally staged photos and even silent moving pictures, but the br...
On a pair of snowy evenings in Chicago in February 1926, two young dancers from Charleston competed with other couples to determine the most proficient “Charlestoners” in the United States. Spectators judged their steps to be the most graceful and...
The popularity of the new “Charleston” dance spread across the nation in 1925, but critics in the city of its birth generally held the fad at arm’s length. The invitation to participate in a national dance contest convinced local leaders to embrac...
Bee Jackson was a young professional dancer who tried to establish a reputation in the 1920s as the premiere exponent of the “Charleston” steps. Crisscrossing the United States and touring Europe, she boldly promoted herself as the “originator” of...
The dance craze known as the “Charleston” achieved world-wide fame nearly a century ago and has endured as the epitome of the carefree exuberance of the “Roaring Twenties.” Although this popular phenomenon shares a name with our home town, it aros...
This week we continue our conversation about Charleston’s Liberty Tree, a majestic live oak that shaded many important events associated with the American Revolution. Because it hosted gatherings of rebellious South Carolinians, British soldiers d...
Charleston’s Liberty Tree is an important part of the story of the American Revolution in South Carolina. As a venue for both weighty political debates and patriotic celebrations, it appears as a relatively minor character in the general narrative...
Commemorating the end of slavery has been an important part of the yearly calendar in numerous communities across the United States since the end of the Civil War, but there is no singular date of observance. Whether one celebrates the demise of h...
The tabby Horn Work that once guarded the northern approach to Charleston formed the citadel of American resistance during the British siege of 1780, but the story of its construction commenced decades before the Revolution. It arose from prolonge...
Have you heard the story of the Horn Work in Marion Square? You know—that mysterious, unobtrusive, lumpy slab of concrete covered with oyster shells standing in the park near King Street? Did you know it’s actually a tiny remnant of a massive fort...