Carl Borick in Conversation with Angela Elder

Join us for an evening with Carl Borick in conversation with Angela Elder. Following their discussion Carl's new book Backcountry Resistance and an audience Q&A, Carl with be signing copies of his books.

About the Book

"With Backcountry Resistance [Borick] has written what is probably the definitive work on a pivotal period in South Carolina history, one that surely will be deepened in importance as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Republic these gallant citizens helped to create and defend."―Post and Courier

In Backcountry Resistance, Carl P. Borick delivers a groundbreaking account of the citizen militia that defied British forces in South Carolina's volatile Backcountry during the pivotal Southern campaign of the Revolutionary War. When Charleston fell in May of 1780 and the Continental Army retreated, many assumed the Patriot cause in the South had collapsed. In the state's rugged interior, though, partisan militias waged a brutal insurgency that challenged British control and changed the course of the war.

Focusing on rank-and-file militiamen, Borick explores how these ordinary men were recruited, armed, fed, and motivated. Drawing on underused pension records and state claims, he reconstructs their everyday realities and their battlefield experiences. He also examines the war's devastating effects on civilians, including enslaved people and women, who played crucial roles in the struggle.

Richly detailed and grounded in the human experience of warfare, Backcountry Resistance offers the most comprehensive portrait to date of South Carolina's militia during the decisive years of the American War of Independence.

About the Author

Carl P. Borick is director of the Charleston Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, and the author of Relieve Us of This Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South, 1780-1782 (USC Press, 2011) and A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780 (USC Press, 2012).

About the Conversation Partner 

Angela Elder is an Associate Professor of History at Converse University.  She earned her doctorate from the University of Georgia and her research explores emotion and gender in the American Civil War. She most recently published Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss (2022, UNC Press).  She is now at work on a project studying the Dry Tortugas, which held a remote Civil War prison off the coast of Florida.