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“Here was a thin neck in the hourglass of the Afro-American past‚ a place where individual grains from all along the West African coast had been funneled together‚ only to be fanned out across the American landscape with the passage of time.”
Peter H. Wood, Black Majority

CLAW History

In 1994, the College established the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World to promote scholarship on the Lowcountry, the Atlantic World, and the connections between the two, to strengthen the College’s instructional program, and to promote public understanding of the region and its place in a broader international context.

What's New?

Mano River Fulbright Group

College of Charleston employess will depart Charleston May 25 bound for West Africa. Curtis J. Franks (Avery Research Center) and Lisa B. Randle (CLAW Program) are among 13 educators selected to participate in the prestigious Mano River Fulbright program.

The objectives of the trip include experiencing daily life and customs of West Africa; drawing connections among Gullah, Geechee, and West African cultures; and sharing these lessons with African and Lowcountry students and adults. The group will study in Sierra Leone and Guinea for approximately five weeks. The entire Mano River Fulbright team includes employees from Trident Technical College, the Charleston County School District, the College of Charleston, the Avery Institute, the South Carolina State Museum, and Chicago State University.

Participants will attend lectures, visit local sites and cruise the Niger and Moa Rivers. The delegation will also visit primary and secondary schools. Each program participant will submit a journal and will conduct presentations to various civic groups in the Charleston area when they return home.

In order to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the international slave trade, the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World program at the College of Charleston is spearheading an ambitious city-wide collaboration to commemorate slavery, resistance, and abolition, and the African American contribution as a whole to the development of Charleston, the Lowcountry, South Carolina, and the nation. The commemoration invites involvement from all of the city and region's major historical sites, both publicly and privately owned, as well as collaboration with city and state administrations in the areas of archives, education, and tourism. As part of the ongoing international UNESCO transatlantic slave trade curriculum initiative, the CLAW program will be working with state and local education authorities to integrate the commemoration into school curricula. Charleston's Office of Cultural Affairs will include appropriate events in its Moja, Spoleto USA, and Piccolo Spoleto festivals in 2007-8. Click here to view events in the Charleston area (PDF).

The College of Charleston will be marking the commemoration by offering an array of special courses, guest lectures, performances and exhibitions, as well as a major international conference scheduled for late March 2008. Related events and classes at the College of Charleston and Trident Technical College (in PDF).

New Publications:

Votaries of Apollo by Nic Butler The Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) at the College of Charleston presents Dr. Nic Butler of the Charleston County Public Library speaking on his book Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Chamber Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766-1820, on Thursday February 21, at 7 p.m., in Arnold Hall, Yaschik Jewish Studies Center (corner of Wentworth and Glebe Sts.).

Blending archival research with musical expertise, Butler offers a definitive history of the dynamic and vibrant concert life in Charleston, South Carolina, during the era from 1766 to 1820, when the exclusive St. Cecilia Society functioned as North America's premier musical organization. In the process he provides an unprecedented look into the early membership and inner workings of this storied society. This work was the winner of CLAW’s Hines Prize in 2005. Butler’s talk will include a PowerPoint presentation and samples of the music played at early Charleston concerts. For more information please call 843 953 1915.

To Make This Land Our Own: Community, Identity, and Cultural Adaptation in Purrysburg Township, South Carolina

Also recently released Arlin C. Migliazzo, To Make This Land Our Own: Community, Identity, and Cultural Adaptation in Purrysburg Township, South Carolina, 1732-1865, from USC Press's Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World book series. A case study in the social history of frontier town building set in the swamps of South Carolina.

UNESCO’s African Passages

UNESCO's African Passages In 2004, the Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project (TST) of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) encouraged each participating member state to develop a “Site of Memory” website about their region as an educational resource for teachers and other educators around the world. An important aim of UNESCO’s Transatlantic Slave Trade Education Project is the preservation and protection of places of memory related to the Slave Trade. Over 100 schools in 23 nations around the Atlantic World participate in this project.

A “site of memory” is a contemporary geographic or physical location with cultural, spiritual, or historic elements that can be interpreted to teach some or all of the themes of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It can include buildings, the natural environment or the site of a significant event.

UNESCO’s African Passages is intended to be a prototype “Site of Memory” website. Focusing on the Ashley River Historic District of the Lowcountry surrounding Charleston, South Carolina, it explores the journey of Africans from freedom to slavery, the transformation of the landscape and development of wealth generated by the work of enslaved Africans, and the surviving traditions of those individuals in contemporary South Carolina.

UNESCO’s African Passages is a multimedia presentation and demonstrates not only the past contributions of enslaved people but reveals as well the enduring legacy of those contributions—in people, in music, in naming practices, in the built environment—as part of our effort to reveal the "living" past. Created and refined through a collaboration of academic and public historians, historic site and museum professionals, interested individuals and educators from around the world, this website contains spoken word and musical recordings, a series of primary documents—including maps and plantation records, as well as a detailed educational component with lesson plans and additional activities for teachers’ use in integrating the materials into their classrooms.

UNESCO’s African Passages