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In 1935 he was elected Speaker Pro Tem of the S.C. House of Representatives. Two years later he was chosen Speaker of the House. He held this position from 1937 to 1973 with the exception of the period from 1947 to 1951, when he did not oppose Governor Strom Thurmond’s candidate for Speaker, C. Bruce Littlejohn. In 1951 Blatt was reelected Speaker of the House by a vote of 113 to 9. He held the position until stepping down in 1973.

As governor, Blease emphasized individual freedom for whites and racism. He opposed government regulation, even if its purpose was to benefit the same mill workers to whom he appealed. He denounced an act to limit working hours for mill employees, believing it interfered with parents’ control over their children. He vetoed legislation to inspect factories for safety and health considerations, stating that a man ought to be able to work under any conditions he chose. He opposed compulsory education as an attempt to replace parents with “the paid agents of the State in the control of children,” and he vetoed four compulsory attendance bills while governor.

Until 1993 Blenheim Bottling Company avoided any attempts at modernization. Each bottle was taken off the production line and hand-shaken to mix the granulated sugar into the ale. That laborious process ended when Alan Schafer, proprietor of the South of the Border entertainment complex located just south of the North Carolina state line, bought out the bottler and built a modern plant. The spicy ale has developed a cult following among food and wine aficionados.

Charleston served as the Confederacy’s main port from November 1861 to July 1863. During this time some thirty-six steam-powered blockade-runners made 125 trips in and out of Charleston, carrying out nearly 30,000 bales of cotton. The majority of the ships operated out of Nassau, although some came from Havana and Bermuda. Primarily private companies used Charleston, while Wilmington, North Carolina, was home to the government’s blockade-runners.

The state is famed for Winnsboro blue granite, which was quarried for many years in Fairfield County. The stone is of light blue color and contains particles of mica, feldspar, and quartz. It is much prized in construction and decoration.

There are commonly two understandings of the Blue Ridge. The first is the geologic Blue Ridge, which is found only in Oconee County, bounded on the west by the Chattooga River and on the east by the Brevard Fault. The second is the geographic Blue Ridge, which includes both the Blue Ridge Mountains and inner Piedmont mountains such as Sassafras, Pinnacle, and Table Rock.

Primarily supported by Charleston merchants and built by Irish and German immigrants and local slaves, the Blue Ridge Railroad was intended to return the port city to commercial prominence in the region. Funding was problematic, however, with investors outside of Charleston displaying little interest in the project. Only a massive infusion of state funds in the mid-1850s kept the Blue Ridge Railroad alive, but it was not enough to complete the line.

The grandson of former chief Samuel Taylor Blue, Gilbert Blue was elected chief of the Catawba Tribe of South Carolina in 1973. Under Chief Blue’s leadership, the Catawba successfully pursued their lawsuit against the state of South Carolina for land claims under the Nations Ford Treaty of 1840 and their quest for the reinstatement of status as a federally recognized Indian tribe.

Chief Samuel Blue was the driving force behind the political revival of the Catawba tribe. It was during his second administration that the Catawba finally became a federally recognized tribe and recovered parts of their original reservation.

In South Carolina, the hotbed was the Greenville-Spartanburg area, where a coterie of talented guitarists contributed to a style that became known as the “Piedmont” or East Coast school of blues.

Located on the twenty-foot-high bluffs of the May River and facing the cool, southerly winds, it was an ideal summer refuge for planter families. The town, known first simply as May River and then later as Kirk’s Bluff, was officially named Bluffton in 1844. The development of Hilton Head as a major tourist destination in the early 1970s marked a revitalization of Bluffton. Annexations and the spread of Hilton Head’s resort and tourism economy led to a seventy-five percent increase in Bluffton’s population during the 1990s.

Aggrieved by the Tariff of 1842 and the refusal of Congress to annex Texas, St. Luke’s Parish planters formed a committee and called for a meeting of individuals and their local congressman, Robert Barnwell Rhett, to speak about these issues that had plagued the South since the 1820s. Invitations were sent to nearby parishes, prominent men, and area newspapers (including those in Charleston and Savannah). At this dinner and others to follow, Rhett, a longtime nullifier and disunionist, attempted to rally support for a state convention. He hoped such a convention would nullify the Tariff of 1842 or urge South Carolina’s immediate secession from the Union.

Spartanburg County won a major recruiting battle over BMW’s first non-Bavarian factory on June 23, 1992, when the company chose Greer over approximately 250 other localities around the world. BMW’s decision was hailed both locally and internationally as the crowning achievement of the South Carolina Piedmont’s campaign for international industrial recruitment.

The national trend toward improving waterways and other public facilities led South Carolina to create the Board of Public Works in December 1819. The enabling legislation created a five-person board headed by two paid acting commissioners.

Headed by four generations of Jones family evangelists, the university emerged from the separatist fundamentalist movement and has from its inception been committed to “combating all atheistic, agnostic, pagan and so-called scientific adulterations of the gospel.” Wary of any secular standards of education, the university eschews accreditation by external agencies, although it is state-certified to offer degrees from the bachelor’s level through the Ph.D.

The gallery's collections contain around four hundred representative works of Flemish, Dutch, German, French, Italian, and Spanish painting from the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Among them are outstanding examples from the brushes of Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese, Botticelli, Preti, Reni, Le Brun, Gerard David, Cranach, Murillo, Ribera, Rubens, and Van Dyck.

In early 1961 a vacancy occurred in the county’s S.C. House of Representatives delegation, requiring a special off-year election to fill the unexpired term. Although a Republican had not held a seat in the General Assembly since 1902, local party leaders moved quickly to recruit Boineau as their candidate. Boineau won handily with fifty-five percent of the vote. He ran strongest in white precincts in Columbia, while Joe Berry, his principal opponent, received disproportionate support from black precincts and in the county’s less urbanized areas.

Bolden is a veteran of four space flights. In January 1986 he served as part of the crew of the space shuttle Columbia, which deployed the SATCOM KU satellite, and performed experiments in astrophysics and materials processing. Four years later, in April 1990, Bolden piloted the space shuttle Discovery, whose crew deployed the Hubble Space Telescope.

Bonham rode with James Bowie into San Antonio de Béxar and the Alamo in early January 1836. The town of Bonham, Texas, was named in his honor.

As governor, Bonham sought to strengthen state laws on conscription, slave impressments, and desertion, taking positions more in support of the Confederate government.