Walter Edgar's Journal

(Broadcast on SC Public Radio on December 12, 2025) – Today we are featuring a very special edition of the Journal, taken from a live broadcast on SC Public Radio on December 12. Sean Birch, Director of SCPR, will be your host, talking with Walter Edgar and Alfred Turner about the 25th anniversary of Walter Edgar’s Journal. The program features questions and comments from our radio audience and clips from past programs.

Today our guest is Mt. Pleasant native Grady Hendrix, author of the horror novel Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (2025, Berkley Books).  The novel is set in Florida in 1970 and is about a group of pregnant teenage girls, living in a maternity home for unwed girls, who discover a book on witchcraft. For the first time in their lives power seems to be in the hands.We’ll talk with Grady about this latest book, as well as some of his past one, and explore how he came to specialize in the horror fiction genre.

This week we'll be talking with Dr. Jennifer Whitmer Taylor of Duquesne University about her book, Rebirth: Creating the Museum of the Reconstruction Era and the Future of the House Museum (2025, University of SC Press).In Rebirth, Taylor provides a compelling account of how to reenvision the historic house museum. Using the Museum of the Reconstruction Era—known as the Woodrow Wilson Family Home for most of its many years as a house museum—as a case study, Taylor explores the challenges and possibilities that face public history practitioners and museum professionals who provide complex interpretations of contested public memory. Anchored by oral history interviews with docents who interact directly with the visiting public, Rebirth considers how a dated and seemingly outmoded venue for interpretation, the historic house museum, can be reimagined for twenty-first-century audiences. 

This week Walter will be talking with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns about the American Revolution, focusing on the routing of the British and their allies by revolutionary Partisans during Cornwallis’ Southern campaign. Ken will also tell us a bit about his upcoming PBS documentary, The American Revolution. The six-part, 12-hour documentary series explores the country’s founding struggle and its eight-year War for Independence.This much-anticipated series will premiere on Sunday, November 16, and will air for six consecutive nights, from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. on PBS and SCETV. The full series will be available to stream beginning Sunday, November 16 at PBS.org and on the PBS App. 

Today we’ll be switching things up a bit. Instead of Walter and Alfred interviewing a guest we will have a guest interviewing Walter.The conversation is part of the Spring 2025 program put on by the University South Caroliniana Society: “E is for Edgar – Conversation and Barbeque with Walter.” Talking with Walter today is Beryl Dakers, president of the Society and long-time producer with SCETV.