Back on January 11th, I proclaimed that I could cover the monthly themes offered by the Diversify Your Reading Facebook page with materials in the BDC and/or Local History sections. I had a little trouble with February's theme and I am having trouble selecting the featured item for May - not because of too few choices as was the case with February's selection but because of the almost overwhelming amount of choices for May's selection!
As you can see the theme for May is History. In the Dewey Decimal Classification system all items cataloged in the 900s relate to Geography and History. All but three of the shelves in the public area of the BDC have DDC numbers in the 900s. In the stacks behind the locked door, there are rows upon rows of items with 900s DDC spine labels. Over half of the storage area shelves house books, DVDs, pamphlets, CDs, etc. classified in the 900s.
How am I to choose just one geography & history related title to highlight here to satisfy the challenge? It will be difficult.
Personally I like many of the materials in the collection. Indeed, I've chosen most of the materials in the Research Room over the past 23 years - for quite specific reasons. Some items I use a great deal in my work as research support for social media posts and as recommended sources for other researchers. Some of the titles are on my short list of titles that incoming BDC staff need to read and understand in order to get grounded to help our in-room customers. Some titles are collections in and of themselves like all of the War of the Rebellion volumes or all of the 120 volumes of articles within the South Carolina Historical Magazine. Some titles are only focused on a particular person, topic or event while others sweep over broader periods of historical time.
How can one truly compare the Historic Beaufort County: An Illustrated History by Michael Taylor and the 3 volumes of Beaufort District's Bible, The History of Beaufort County South Carolina, 1514 - 2007 by Larry Rowland, Steve Wise and Gerhard Spieler with such specific works as The Bluffton Expedition by Jeff Fulgham or Captain William Hilton and the Founding of Hilton Head Island by Dwayne Pickett?
Each has its strengths. Each helps in some way to provide a fuller understanding of the breadth, depth and scope of Beaufort District's long and storied history. All are significant though each in its own way.
Past readers of Connections and the BDC's Facebook page that I do tend to mention certain key titles often. Past BDC employees know that I have my 5 most important titles that I use in their training. And I also have worked with a number of authors through the years whom I definitely do not want to disappoint should I choose their title as my featured history themed book for this challenge.
Could I come up with a "Grace's Favorite Things" display case such as Cassie did back in December? No. I'd have to have several cases to be able to include my personal top 50 materials - even if I was able to narrow down my choices to 50, rather than 100 or even 250 titles. 
Do I go with a title under 200 pages that tend to be most popular among local history section customers - like the ones shown on the right from a 2019 flyer I made?
Do I go with a title that only the more academic researchers of the BDC's customers tend to use?
Do I just select one with the most illustrations?
The BDC gets a lot of genealogical researchers - and we have a lot of genealogy materials in the 900s. Is there one title that I like the absolute best?
Do I focus on historical works about minorities or special populations?
Do I go with a title that I think is fun?
Do I go with the most scandalous or salacious facets of the area's past?
Do I choose the title that best illustrates that it is the most outrageously obvious product of its time?
Obviously, I have given May's selection some thought - and after all that pondering, I think that I should stick to what is in my opinion the most classic of Beaufort District related titles, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment by Willie Lee Rose (1964). Her research was prodigious and thorough. Her work has withstood the test of time and retains its relevance more than 50 years after its publication. It was a key title in my own interest in South Carolina history. It opened my eyes to how politics, economics, and social mores impact, interpret, and inform race relations. It was an important book when I discovered it in the Winyah High School Library in the 1970s and it remains an important book today - so much so that it has been continuously in print since its initial publication.
From the University of Georgia Press's catalog page:
Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina's Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands.
Rehearsal for Reconstruction, winner of the Allan Nevins Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Charles S. Sydnor Prize, is historian Willie Lee Rose's chronicle of change in this Sea Island region from its capture in 1861 through Reconstruction. With epic sweep, Rose demonstrates how Port Royal constituted a stage upon which a dress rehearsal for the South's postwar era was acted out.
Richard Bardolph of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro was prophetic in his review in 1966: "Gracefully written, competently organized, and exhaustively researched, [the] book before us may well prove the definitive treatment which will further recounting of the narrative unnecessary for a good while to come."
I believe that anyone who lives in Beaufort County with even an iota of interest in local history should read the seminal Rehearsal for Reconstruction. There are loads of copies available for check out through the local history sections at the Branch Libraries.
There are well over 200 titles about the course of Reconstruction in this area within the Beaufort District Collection, including an unpublished paper "The Great Port Royal Experiment, following the War Between the States" presented by Brantley Harvey, Jr. before the Beaufort County Historical Society in 1962, The Port Royal Experiment : A Case Study in Development by Kevin Dougherty (2014) and The Case for Port Royal : Interpreting the Reconstruction Era National Monument by Eric Plaag (2017). There are even more titles about the Reconstruction Period in the United States available through the SCLENDS consortium.
Fun fact: The Southern Association for Women Historians annually award the Willie Lee Rose Prize for the "best book on any topic in southern history written by a woman or women.
Note: Bardolph, Richard. Book Review: Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment by Willie Lee Rose, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 90, issue 1, January 1966, pp. 141 -143.
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