Event 04 of 05

Carl P. Borick

Director, The Charleston Museum  ·  Charleston, South Carolina

Carl P. Borick is Director of The Charleston Museum — America's first museum — in Charleston, South Carolina. In his latest book, Backcountry Resistance: South Carolina's Militia and the Fight for Independence, he delivers a groundbreaking account of the citizen militias 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. Yet in the state's rugged interior, partisan militias waged a brutal insurgency that challenged British control and changed the course of the war. Focusing on rank-and-file militiamen, Borick draws on underused pension records and state claims to reconstruct their everyday realities and battlefield experiences. He is also the author of Relieve Us of This Burthen: American Prisoners of War in the Revolutionary South, 1780–1782 and A Gallant Defense: The Siege of Charleston, 1780, both published by USC Press.