Backcountry Resistance Author Talk with Carl Borick (Spartanburg, SC)
Join us for an author talk with Carl P. Borick, in conversation with Angela Elder, who will discuss his new book, Backcountry Resistance.
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.
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).
Angela Elder is 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.
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Posted on August 17, 2026 | Categories: Events