In Case You Missed It: Distinguished Speakers Series Presentation by S. Max Edelson

As part of the Drayton Hall Distinguished Speakers Series, S. Max Edelson presented Mapping Carolina: Cartography and the Quest for Empire in the Colonial Southeast on April 17th. Edelson is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, where he co-directs the UVA-Monticello Early American Seminar. His research focuses on colonial British America and the Atlantic world. His first book, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard, 2006), examines the relationship between planters and the Lowcountry environment as the key to understanding a society that was as repressive as it was prosperous. His forthcoming book, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Harvard, 2015), examines the importance of cartography to American empire. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Edelson has developed MapScholar, an interactive visualization tool to display historic map collections online.

Fall Series

The fall 2014 Drayton Hall Distinguished Speaker Series will bring another trio of accomplished academics, researchers and speakers to Charleston, with a September 18th presentation by Ronald L. Hurst, Colonial Williamsburg, entitled A Rich and Varied Culture: The Material World of the Early South; an October 16th presentation by Andrew O’Shaughnessy, University of Virginia/Monticello, entitled The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire; and a November 20th presentation by Architectural Historian Jill M. Lord entitled Improvement of the Americas: The Architecture of Colonial American Libraries. Click here for more information.