Book Your Lunch with Susan Williams and Stephen Hoffius - Upheaval in Charleston November 28, 2011

Let these SC authors tell you about the Upheaval in Charleston (UGA Press, hardcover, $29.95) in the years just after Reconstruction. Blacks and whites were struggling to coexist after the Civil War, and then came more devastation: the most powerful earthquake to ever hit the southeastern United States.

On August 31, 1886, a massive earthquake centered near Charleston, South Carolina, sent shock waves as far north as Maine, down into Florida, and west to the Mississippi River. When the dust settled, residents of the old port city were devastated by the death and destruction.
Upheaval in Charleston is a gripping account of natural disaster and turbulent social change in a city known as the cradle of secession. Weaving together the emotionally charged stories of Confederate veterans and former slaves, Susan Millar Williams and Stephen G. Hoffius portray a South where whites and blacks struggled to determine how they would coexist a generation after the end of the Civil War.

This is also the story of Francis Warrington Dawson, a British expatriate drawn to the South by the romance of the Confederacy. As editor of Charleston’s News and Courier, Dawson walked a lonely and dangerous path, risking his life and reputation to find common ground between the races. Hailed as a hero in the aftermath of the earthquake, Dawson was denounced by white supremacists and murdered less than three years after the disaster. His killer was acquitted after a sensational trial that unmasked a Charleston underworld of decadence and corruption.

Combining careful research with suspenseful storytelling, Upheaval in Charleston offers a vivid portrait of a volatile time and an anguished place.

About the authors:
Susan Millar Williams is the author of A Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin, winner of the Julia Cherry Spruill Award, given by the American Association of Women Historians for the best book of the year in southern women’s history. The SCETV documentary Cheating the Stillness: The Life of Julia Peterkin, which aired on PBS stations across the nation in 2011, was based largely on the biography, and Williams co-wrote the script and appears in the film. She is the editor of two award-winning community cookbooks published by the McClellanville Arts Council, The McClellanville Coast Cookbook and the McClellanville Coast Seafood Cookbook. She has also published in The Nation, the Southern Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and the Women’s Review of Books. A native of Stuttgart, Arkansas, Williams holds a Ph.D. in English literature with a minor in history from Louisiana State University, an M.A. from the University of Arkansas, and a B.A. from Hendrix College. Married to Dwight Williams, mother of Olivia Williams, Susan teaches American literature and creative writing at Trident Technical College in Charleston and lives in McClellanville, South Carolina.

Stephen G. Hoffius is the author of Winners and Losers, a prize-winning novel for young adults. A freelance editor, he co-edited The Life and Art of Alfred Hutty: Woodstock to Charleston (forthcoming, with Sara C. Arnold), Northern Money, Southern Land: The Lowcountry Plantation Sketches of Chlotilde R. Martin (with Robert B. Cuthbert), and The Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art (with Angela D. Mack). He is the managing editor of Home House Press in Charleston, which published his Civil War in South Carolina: Selections from the South Carolina Historical Magazine (co-edited with Lawrence S. Rowland). For twelve years he served as director of publications for the South Carolina Historical Society. He works with a number of authors, helping them prepare manuscripts for print. He has contributed to The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and the Charlotte Observer. A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and graduate of Duke University, he is married to Susan Dick Hoffius, father of Anna Dunn Hoffius and Jacob Dunn Hoffius, and lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

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