South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum. It fired the first shots of the Civil War. It invented nullification. It blockaded its own harbor with pirates. It sent Strom Thurmond to the Senate for 48 years. It built one of the great cities of the colonial world on the labor of enslaved people, nearly got destroyed by the people it was enslaving, survived Sherman's march with its attitude intact, and produced, in the same 350 years, some of the most consequential villains and most remarkable heroes in American history, often from the same county.

Pluff Mud and Providence is the story of that place: 13,000 years of human habitation compressed into twelve chapters, with full attention paid to the drama, the absurdity, the genuine evil, and the genuine courage that have made South Carolina the most consistently interesting and most consequentially troublesome state in the union. This is not an impartial history. Impartial histories of South Carolina tend to underplay the drama, and the drama is frankly the whole point.

From the Mississippian cities that preceded European contact to the Gullah Geechee basket weavers still fighting to stay on land their families have held for 300 years, from Blackbeard blockading Charleston Harbor to the nine young men who went to jail rather than pay a fine and changed the strategy of an entire civil rights movement, from John C. Calhoun building an elaborate philosophical case for human slavery to Robert Brown Elliott dismantling it on the floor of Congress, this is the history that the official version left out, told with the irreverence the material demands and the seriousness it deserves.

The pluff mud smells terrible. You will come to love it anyway.